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Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (27 May 1850 – 15 November 1892), also known as the Lambeth Poisoner, was a Scottish-born serial killer, who claimed his first proven victims in the United States and the rest in England, and possibly others in Canada and Scotland. Cream, who poisoned his victims, was executed after his attempts to frame others for his crimes brought him to the attention of London police.
Unsubstantiated rumours suggested his last words as he was being hanged were a confession that he was Jack the Ripper—even though he was in prison at the time of the Ripper murders.
Born in Glasgow, Cream was raised outside Quebec City, Canada, after his family moved there in 1854. He attended McGill University in Montreal and went to study medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, London in 1876; he had an added incentive for crossing the Atlantic to England, since he had just married Flora Brooks, whom he had impregnated and almost killed while aborting the baby: the bride's family forced him to the church at gunpoint. Flora died, apparently of consumption, in 1877, a death for which he would later be blamed.
Cream went to London in 1876 to study at St. Thomas' Hospital and later

Joseph D. (Joe) Ball (January 6, 1892 – September 24, 1938) was an American serial killer, sometimes referred to as "The Alligator Man", the "Butcher of Elmendorf" and the "Bluebeard of South Texas". He is said to have killed at least 20 women in the 1930s. His existence was long believed to be apocryphal, but he is a familiar figure in Texas folklore.
After serving on the front lines in Europe during World War I, Ball started his career as a bootlegger, providing illegal liquor to those who could pay. After the end of Prohibition, he opened a saloon called the Sociable Inn in Elmendorf, Texas. He built a pond that contained five alligators because he misunderstood the term corpus delicti, believing that a murder conviction without a body would be impossible. He charged people to view them, especially during feeding time; the food consisted mostly of live cats and dogs.
After a while women in the area were reported missing, including barmaids, former girlfriends and his wife. When two Bexar County sheriff's deputies went to question him in 1938, Ball pulled a handgun from his cash register and killed himself with a bullet through the heart (some sources report that he shot himself

Amelia Sach (1873 - 3 February 1903) and Annie Walters (1869 - 3 February 1903) were two British serial killers better known as the Finchley baby farmers.
Amelia Sach operated a "lying-in" home in Stanley Road, and later at Claymore House in Hertford Road (both in East Finchley), London. Around 1900, she began to advertise that babies "could be left", and took money for adoptions. The clients, judging from the witness accounts, were mostly servants from local houses who had become pregnant, and who had employers who were keen for the matter to be resolved discreetly. There was a charge for lying-in, and another for adoption, a "present" to future parents of between £25 and £30.
Annie Walters would collect the baby after it was born, and then dispose of it with poison — chlorodyne (a medicine containing morphine). They were caught after Walters raised the suspicions of her landlord in Islington who was a police officer. An unknown number of babies were murdered this way, possibly dozens. During their trial at the Old Bailey, the quantity of baby clothes found at Claymore House was used as evidence of the scale of their crimes. A local campaign to have their sentences commuted to

Johann "Jack" Unterweger (16 August 1950 – 29 June 1994) was an Austrian serial killer who murdered prostitutes in several countries. First convicted of a 1974 murder, he was released in 1990 due in part to a campaign by intellectuals and politicians, who regarded Unterweger as an example of rehabilitation. He became a journalist and minor celebrity, but within months started killing again. He committed suicide following a conviction for several murders.
Born in 1950 to Theresia Unterweger, a Viennese barmaid and waitress, and an unknown American soldier who she met in Trieste. Some sources describe his mother as a prostitute. His mother was jailed for fraud while pregnant but was released and travelled to Graz where he was born. In 1953, his mother was again arrested and Jack was sent to Carinthia in southern Austria to live with his grandfather who he described as a violent alcoholic.
He was in and out of prison during his youth for petty crimes, and for assaulting a local prostitute. Between 1966 and 1975 he was convicted 16 times, mostly for sexual assault and spent most of those 9 years in jail. In 1974, Unterweger murdered 18-year-old German Margaret Schäfer by strangling her

Scott Wilson Williams is an American serial killer who shot and dismembered three women in Union County, North Carolina between 1997 and 2006.
Evidence against Williams included DNA, ballistics, witness identification by his surviving victims, and statements by Williams himself.
On July 18, 2008, Williams entered Alford pleas to the murder charges and was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole. In addition, Williams entered Alford pleas to charges of first-degree kidnapping, rape, and sexual offenses against two other women in 1995 and 2000. Williams is incarcerated in Alexander Correctional Institution.

Roberto Succo, (Venice April 3, 1962 – Vicenza May 23, 1988) was an Italian serial killer who committed several murders and other violent crimes mostly in Italy and France in the 1980s.
Succo committed his first known murders on April 9, 1981 when he fatally stabbed his mother and his father, a Police officer; they had refused to lend him their car. He then escaped, hiding his parents' bodies in the bathtub covered in water and lime to delay the discovery of the murders, and taking away his father's service pistol. After Succo was caught, he was judged mentally ill and he was sentenced to 10 years in a psychiatric prison in Reggio Emilia. While in the facility, he completed his studies and earned a degree in political science.
On May 15, 1986, after serving five years of his sentence, Succo escaped from the psychiatric hospital. He evaded police and left the country to travel to France by rail. In the next few years, Succo committed numerous crimes ranging from burglary to rape to murder; in France, he raped and killed two teenage girls, murdered a physician, and two Police officers who were about to capture him.
He kidnapped, hijacked, and terrorized people across at least four

Charles Edmund Cullen (born February 22, 1960) is a former nurse who is the most prolific serial killer in New Jersey history, and suspected to be the most prolific serial killer in American history. Cullen told authorities in December 2003 that he could specifically recall the murder of perhaps 40 patients during the 16 years he worked at 10 hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. As part of his plea agreement, Cullen has been working with law enforcement officials to identify additional victims. He originally told authorities he killed up to 40 patients during the course of his 16-year nursing career. But in subsequent interviews with police, psychiatric professionals, and the only journalist with whom he had ever granted interviews, Charles Graeber, it soon became clear that he had killed many more, whom he could not specifically remember. Experts have estimated that Charles Cullen may ultimately be responsible for some 400 murders, which would make him the most prolific serial killer in American history.
Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey, being the youngest of 8 children. His father, a bus driver, was 58 years old at the time of Charles' birth. Cullen's father died

John Joseph Joubert IV (July 2, 1963 – July 17, 1996) was an American serial killer convicted of the murders of three boys in Maine and Nebraska. He was executed in Nebraska.
Joubert was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on July 2, 1963. A bright child, Joubert began reading at age three and renting books from a public library at five. He was later found to have an IQ of 123, signifying above average intelligence. Joubert's parents divorced when he was six years old, and he stayed to live with his mother, whom he greatly resented throughout his life as being excessively controlling. His mother forbade him from seeing his father, and often stood in the way of him developing connections with his peers and spanked him up until he was twelve years old. He also had problems with his peers, who taunted him on the basis of his relatively small build from the time he was in grade school up until high school.
From a very young age, Joubert began having increasingly violent sadistic fantasies. According to three psychiatric reports prepared on Joubert in 1984, his earliest sadistic fantasies began at around the age of six. These fantasies revolved around murdering and cannibalizing a

Auto Shankar (January 21, 1954 – April 27, 1995) is the nickname of an Indian serial killer.
Shankar and his gang were found guilty of six murders, committed over a period of two years in 1988–1989. They were tried for the murders of Lalitha, Sudalai, Sampath, Mohan, Govindaraj and Ravi. The bodies of the victims were either burnt or buried inside residential houses.
In late 1988, over a period of approximately six months, nine teenage girls from the Thiruvanmiyur section of Chennai disappeared. In the beginning, investigators believed that the girls had been sold into prostitution by families unable to afford wedding dowries, but the consistent denials by their kin forced them to seek another explanation.
Late in December, a schoolgirl named Subalakshmi claimed that an auto rickshaw driver had attempted to abduct her in front of a wine shop. Working undercover in the local wine shop back-rooms, detectives learned of a rumour that an auto driver called Shankar was behind the crimes, disposing of the bodies by cremating them and pouring the remains into the Bay of Bengal. The following morning, the police picked up the suspect who overnight became known to the nation as "Auto

Marie Delphine LaLaurie (née Macarty or Maccarthy, c. 1775 – c. 1842), more commonly known as Madame LaLaurie, was a Louisiana-born socialite, and serial killer known for her involvement in the torture and murder of black slaves.
Born in New Orleans, LaLaurie married three times over the course of her life. She maintained a prominent position in the social circles of New Orleans until April 10, 1834, when rescuers responding to a fire at her Royal Street mansion discovered bound slaves within the house who showed evidence of torture over a long period. LaLaurie's house was subsequently sacked by an outraged mob of New Orleans citizens, and it is thought that she fled to Paris, where she died due to a boar attack during a hunting accident.
As of 2012, the Royal Street mansion where LaLaurie lived is still standing and is a prominent New Orleans landmark.
Delphine Macarty was born around 1775, one of five children. Her father was Barthelmy Louis Macarty, whose father Barthelmy Macarty brought the family to New Orleans from Ireland around 1730. Her mother was Marie Jeanne Lovable, also known as "the widow Lecomte," whose marriage to Barthelmy Louis Macarty was her second. Both were

The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The killer's identity is still unknown. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name "Zodiac" in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved.
Numerous suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. In April 2004, the San Francisco Police Department marked the case "inactive", yet re-opened the case at some point prior to March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa County and Solano County. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.
Although the Zodiac claimed 37 murders in letters to the newspapers, investigators agree on only seven confirmed victims, two of whom survived. They are:
The following

Patrick Wayne Kearney (born September 24, 1939) is an American serial killer who preyed on young men in California during the 1970s. He is sometimes referred to as "The Freeway Killer", a nickname he shares with two other separate serial killers, William Bonin and Randy Steven Kraft. Patrick Kearney is possibly among the most prolific serial killers in United States history, claiming possibly as many as 43 victims according to law enforcement.
He was the youngest of three sons and was raised in a reasonably stable family. His early life was not without some trauma, however; as a thin and sickly child, he was often a target for bullies at school. In his teens, he became withdrawn and fantasized about killing people.
Born in East Los Angeles, Kearney also lived in Texas. Kearney moved back to California after a brief marriage ended in divorce, and eventually worked as an engineer for Hughes Aircraft. It was from his experiences in his early years in California that Kearney cultivated his skill as a gay pickup artist. Kearney mostly sought out partners in San Diego and in Tijuana, Mexico, where he used his fluency in Spanish and keen interest in Latin American culture as a basis to

Lucia de Berk, often called Lucia de B. or Lucy de B (born September 22, 1961 in The Hague, Netherlands) is a Dutch licenced paediatric nurse, who was subject to a miscarriage of justice. She was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003 for four murders and three attempted murders of patients in her care. After an appeal, she was convicted in 2004 of seven murders and three attempts. Her conviction was controversial in the media and amongst scientists, and was questioned by investigative reporter Peter R. de Vries. In October 2008, the case was reopened by the Dutch supreme court, as new facts had been uncovered that undermined the previous verdicts. De Berk was freed, and her case was re-tried; she was exonerated in April 2010.
As a result of an unexpected death of a baby (Amber) in the Juliana Kinderziekenhuis (English: Juliana Children's Hospital, JKZ) in The Hague on 4 September 2001, earlier deaths and cardiopulmonary resuscitations were scrutinised. Between September 2000 and September 2001 there appeared to have been nine incidents, which earlier had all been thought unremarkable but now were considered medically suspicious. Lucia de Berk had been on duty at the time of those

Pedro Alonso López (born 8 October 1948 in Santa Isabel, Colombia) is a Colombian serial killer, accused of raping and killing more than 300 girls across South America. Aside from uncited local accounts, López’s crimes first received international attention from an interview conducted by Ron Laytner, a long time freelance photojournalist who reported interviewing López in his Ambato prison cell in 1980.
Laytner’s interviews were widely published, first in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, 13 July 1980, then in the Toronto Sun and The Sacramento Bee on 21 July 1980, and later in many other North American papers and foreign publications over the years. Apart from Laytner’s account and two brief Associated Press wire reports the story was published in The World's Most Infamous Murders by Boar and Blundell.
According to Laytner’s story, López became known as the "Monster of the Andes" in 1980 when he led police to the graves of 53 of his victims in Ecuador, all girls between nine and twelve years old. In 1983 he was found guilty of murdering 110 young girls in Ecuador alone and confessed to a further 240 murders of missing girls in neighbouring Peru and Colombia. López was released from

Jerome Henry "Jerry" Brudos (January 31, 1939 – March 28, 2006) was an American serial killer and necrophiliac, also known as "The Lust Killer" and "The Shoe Fetish Slayer".
Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota, and was the youngest of four sons. His mother had wanted a girl and would dress Brudos in girl's clothing. She would also constantly belittle him and treat him with disdain, as well as abuse him. As a child, Brudos and his family would move into different homes in the Pacific Northwest, before settling in Salem, Oregon.
He had a fetish for women's shoes from the age of five, after playing with spike-heeled shoes at a local junkyard. He also reportedly attempted to steal the shoes of his first grade teacher. He also had a fetish for women's underwear, and had claimed that he would steal underwear from female neighbors as a child. He spent his teen years in and out of psychotherapy and mental hospitals. He began to stalk local women as a teenager, knocking down or choking them unconscious, and fleeing with their shoes.
At age 17, he abducted and beat a young woman, threatening to stab her if she did not follow his sexual demands. Shortly after being arrested, he was taken

Charles Frederick Albright (born August 10, 1933) is a serial killer from Dallas, Texas, convicted of killing three women in 1991.
Charles was adopted by Delle and Fred Albright, from an orphan's home. His mother, a schoolteacher, was very strict and overprotective of Charles. She accelerated his education, helping him to skip two grades. When he got his first gun as a teenager, he would kill small animals. His mom would help him stuff them due to his interest in becoming a taxidermist. His mother was unable to afford the true glass eyes used in taxidermy, so he used buttons instead.
His criminal career started early. At age 13, he was already a petty thief, and was arrested for aggravated assault. At age 15, he graduated from high school and forged his way into North Texas University. At age 16, the police caught him with some petty cash from a cash register, two handguns and a rifle. He spent a year in jail. After his release he attended Arkansas State Teacher's College and majored in pre-med studies. Found with stolen items, he was expelled from the college before graduation but not prosecuted. Unfazed, he simply falsified his degrees, stealing the right documents, forging

Gary Leon Ridgway (born February 18, 1949) is an American serial killer known as the Green River Killer, convicted of 49 separate murders and confessed to nearly double that number. He murdered numerous women and girls, most of whom were also alleged prostitutes, in Washington during the 1980s and 1990s, earning his nickname when the first five victims were found in the Green River. He strangled them, usually with his arm but sometimes using ligatures. After strangling the women, he would dump their bodies throughout forested and overgrown areas in King County, often returning to the dead bodies to have sexual intercourse with them.
On November 30, 2001, as he was leaving the Renton, Washington Kenworth Truck factory where he worked, he was arrested for the murders of four women whose cases were linked to him through DNA evidence. As part of a plea bargain wherein he agreed to disclose the whereabouts of still-missing women, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.
Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Mary Rita Steinman and Thomas Newton Ridgway. He has two brothers, Gregory Leon and Thomas Edward.
Ridgway's homelife was

Robert Black (born 21 April 1947) is a Scottish paedophile serial killer convicted of the kidnap and murder of four girls between the ages of 5 and 11 between 1981 and 1986 in the United Kingdom. He was convicted of sexually assaulting one of the girls and of raping the other three. Black was also convicted of the kidnap of a fifth girl and the attempted kidnap of a sixth.
Black is a psychopath who is also suspected of a number of unsolved child murders in the UK dating back to 1969 and others in the 1970s throughout Europe.
Black was born in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, Scotland. Black's natural mother, Jessie Hunter Black, refused to put his father's name on his birth certificate and had him fostered. Black was brought up by a foster couple who were in their 50s, Jack and Margaret Tulip. Black did not fit in at school and was given the nickname 'Smelly Robby Tulip' by his classmates, who noticed that Black preferred to hang around with children a year or two younger than he was, rather than people his own age. He developed an early reputation for aggressive and wayward behaviour. Locals recalled that Black often had bruises, although Black himself later said he could not recollect

Mark Rowntree (born 1956 in Bradford, Yorkshire) is a British spree killer who was committed to a mental hospital after he admitted killing four people at random in the town of Bingley, West Yorkshire, during late 1975 and early 1976.
On December 31, 1975 19-year-old Rowntree stabbed widow Grace Adamson to death, then celebrated with a beer at the local pub.on January 3, 1976 he killed sixteen-year-old Stephen Wilson at a bus stop. The victim died in hospital, although he was first able to give a description of his attacker to the police.
On January 7, 1976 Rowntree visited prostitute Barbara Booth at her home and stabbed her to death, along with her three-year-old son Alan. By the time he returned home, the police were waiting for him, armed with the description given by the second victim. Rowntree gave a full confession to his crimes and complained that he had not managed to reach five victims — the body count of his hero, Donald Neilson.
Diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, Rowntree pleaded guilty to four counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility at Leeds Crown Court in June 1976. He was ordered to be committed to Rampton Secure Hospital for an

The Frankford Slasher is the name given by the media to a possible serial killer who operated in and around the neighborhood of Frankford of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1985 to 1990. Leonard Christopher was convicted in the murder of one of the nine supposedly linked victims, but the others remain unsolved. All the victims were sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. Several of the victims were seen with a middle-aged white man shortly before their deaths.
During the investigation into the death of Carol Dowd, Leonard Christopher, an employee at a nearby fish market, became a suspect. Despite the fact that he did not match the witness's description, and that there was no evidence to link him to any of the other eight murders, and little evidence linking him to Dowd's murder, he was tried and convicted of one count of first degree murder on December 12, 1990.

Randall Brent "Randy" Woodfield (born December 26, 1950) is an American serial killer who was dubbed The I-5 Killer or The I-5 Bandit by law enforcement due to the crimes he allegedly committed along the Interstate 5 corridor running through Washington, Oregon, and California. Before his capture, the I-5 Killer was credited with multiple sexual assaults and murders. A native of Oregon, Woodfield was convicted of three murders and is suspected of killing up to 44 people; he is currently incarcerated at the Oregon State Penitentiary. In 2011, Woodfield was the subject of a Lifetime television movie Hunt for the I-5 Killer. The movie was based on the book The I-5 Killer by crime author Ann Rule.
Born in Salem, Oregon, Woodfield came from a middle class family with no signs of dysfunction. He was popular among his peers, and was a football star at Newport High School and at Portland State University. Beginning in adolescence, however, Woodfield began to exhibit antisocial sexual behaviors, primarily a penchant for indecent exposure. Upon his first arrest for the crime in high school, his football coaches hushed it up so that he wouldn't be kicked off the team.
Three arrests in the

Jeanne Weber (7 October 1874 – 1910) was a French serial killer. She strangled 10 children, including her own. She was convicted of murder in 1908, and declared insane. She hanged herself two years later.
Born in a small fishing village in northern France, Weber left home for Paris at age 14, working various menial jobs until her marriage in 1893. Her husband was an alcoholic, and two of their three children died in 1905. By then, Weber was also drinking heavily, residing in a seedy Paris tenement with her spouse and a seven-year-old son.
On 2 March 1905, Weber was babysitting for her sister-in-law, when one of the woman's two daughters — 18-month-old Georgette — suddenly "fell ill" and died. Strange bruises on her neck were ignored by the examining physician, and Weber was welcomed back to babysit on 11 March. Two-year-old Suzanne did not survive the visit, but a doctor blamed the second death on unexplained "convulsions."
Weber was babysitting for her brother, on 25 March, when his daughter, seven-year-old Germaine, suffered a sudden attack of "choking," complete with red marks on her throat. The child survived that episode, but she was less fortunate the following day, when

Juan Vallejo Corona (born c. 1934) is a Mexican American serial killer currently imprisoned in the United States.
He was convicted of the 1971 murders of 25 itinerant laborers; men who had been found buried in shallow graves in the orchards of fruit ranches in Sutter County, California, along the Feather River north of Yuba City, where they did seasonal harvesting and thinning jobs.
At that time, these gruesome crimes represented the worst and most notorious serial murders in U.S. history. The local sheriff said even more men may have been buried in the area.
Corona was sentenced in 1973 to 25 life sentences. His second trial, in 1982, failed to render an acquittal and he was returned to prison to serve out his sentence.
Born in Autlán, Jalisco state, Mexico, Corona first entered the United States in 1950. Crossing the border into California illegally, the 16-year-old picked carrots and melons in the Imperial Valley for three months before moving on north to the Sacramento Valley. His half-brother, Natividad Corona (c. 1923-May 23, 1973), had migrated to the state in 1944 to work, and settled at Marysville, across the Feather River from Yuba City.
Corona moved to the

Nikolai Dzhumagaliev (1952, Cyrillic: Николай Джумагалиев) is a Kazakhstani serial killer. He was found to have killed seven women before he was caught in 1981 but it is felt, however, that he killed somewhere between 50 to 100 women. He was also known as "Metal Fang" for his white metal teeth.
Nikolai Dzhumagaliev made it his mission to rid the world of prostitutes. He would lure women into the dark end of a local park, where he would rape them and hack them to death with an axe. He also practiced cannibalism; he cooked certain parts of his victims, eating some and even serving the rest to friends of his at get-togethers. He made a habit of preparing ethnic dishes out of his victims and serving them to his friends.
Dzhumagaliev's crimes were discovered when two drunks, whom he invited over to his house, discovered a woman's severed head in the kitchen. He was found not responsible for his murders (which are believed to be at least seven) due to insanity, and he was committed to a Tashkent mental institution.
He escaped in 1989 while being transported to another facility. He was re-captured in 1991 in Fergana. After serving ten more years he was released and is said to be living

Ray Copeland (1914–1993) and Faye Della Copeland (1921 – 30 December 2003) became, at the ages of 76 and 69 respectively, the oldest couple ever sentenced to death in the United States. They were convicted of killing five drifters. When her sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1999, Faye Copeland was the oldest woman on death row.
Prior to the murder convictions, Ray had a long history of crimes ranging from petty theft to grand larceny. He was convicted of writing bad checks on a number of occasions. The Copelands were caught and charged with murder after a drifter spotted human remains on their land. Evidently, Ray had hit upon the scheme of hiring drifters, having them pay for cattle at auction with bad checks (which Ray by then was loath to do personally, given his prior convictions), then killing the drifters once they were no longer of any use, with a single bullet to the back of the head. It is unclear if Faye had any knowledge of this scheme, and her lawyers argued that she suffered from battered woman syndrome.
On November 1, 1990, 69-year-old Faye Copeland went to trial. According to articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Faye claimed she did not know her husband

Paul Charles Denyer (born 14 April 1972) is an Australian serial killer, currently serving three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment with a non-parole period 30 years at HM Prison Barwon for the murders of Elizabeth Stevens, 18, Debbie Fream, 22, and Natalie Russell, 17, in Frankston, Victoria in 1993.
Denyer is known as the "Frankston Killer" as his crimes occurred in Frankston and neighbouring suburbs. Denyer was featured in the pilot episode of Seven Network crime series Forensic Investigators.
Denyer stalked and murdered three women in and around the Melbourne suburb of Frankston during a seven week period in 1993. Denyer was 21 at the time of his crimes. During a police interview Denyer said the motivation for his crimes was a hatred of women in general.
The first victim was 18 year old Elizabeth Stevens. She had just alighted from a bus to Langwarrin when she was dragged to nearby Lloyd Park. Her throat was slashed and a criss-cross pattern was carved into her chest.
A month later, the second victim, Deborah Fream, was abducted in the early evening. She had left her car unlocked to run into a store to buy milk. Denyer climbed into the back seat, and hijacked the car

Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (Báthory Erzsébet in Hungarian, Alžbeta Bátoriová in Slovak; 7 August 1560 – 21 August 1614) was a countess from the renowned Báthory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary. Although the number of murders is debated, she has been labeled the most prolific female serial killer in history and is remembered as the "Blood Countess."
After her husband Ferenc Nádasdy's death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls, with one witness attributing to them over 650 victims, though the number for which they were convicted was 80. Elizabeth herself was neither tried nor convicted. In 1610, she was imprisoned in the Csejte Castle, now in Slovakia and known as Čachtice, where she remained bricked in a set of rooms until her death four years later.
Later writings about the case have led to legendary accounts of the Countess bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth and subsequently also to comparisons with Vlad III the Impaler of Wallachia, on whom the fictional Count Dracula is partly based, and to modern nicknames of the Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.
Erzsébeth Báthory was born on a family

Robert Garrow (March 4, 1936–September 11, 1978) was an American spree killer who was active in New York in the early 1970s.
Born in the Upstate New York village of Dannemora, Garrow grew up in a poor family of farmers. Garrow later said that his parents were severe, violent disciplinarians who regularly physically abused their children with whatever was handy, even bricks. (His accounts have been confirmed by his siblings.) The police were called several times throughout the years to break up violent fights between Garrow and his alcoholic father; after a particularly brutal episode when Garrow was 15, he was sent to a farm to work. He joined the Air Force upon his release, but was court-martialed a year later for stealing money from a superior officer and spent six months in a military prison in Florida. After a failed escape attempt, he spent a year in another stockade in Georgia.
Garrow also later reported a long history of sexual dysfunction and paraphilias; he committed several acts of bestiality with the farm animals he worked with throughout childhood and adolescence, and would often perform sadomasochistic masturbation with milking machines.
Garrow returned to New York in

Steven Gerald James Wright (born 24 April 1958) is an English serial killer, also known as the Suffolk Strangler. He is currently serving life imprisonment for the murder of five women who worked as prostitutes in Ipswich, Suffolk. The killings took place during late 2006 and Wright was found guilty in February 2008.
Wright was born in the Norfolk village of Erpingham, the second of four children of military policeman Conrad and veterinary nurse Patricia. He has an older brother David and two younger sisters, Jeanette and Tina. While Wright's father was on military service, the family had lived in both Malta and Singapore. Wright's mother left in 1964 when he was 8; his father divorced his mother in 1977; both later remarried. Wright and his siblings lived with their father, who fathered a son, Keith, and daughter, Natalie, with his second wife, Valerie.
Wright left school in 1974 and soon afterwards joined the Merchant Navy, becoming a chef on ferries sailing from Felixstowe, Suffolk. In 1978 in Milford Haven, he married Angela O'Donovan. They had a son, Michael. The couple separated in 1987 and later divorced. Wright became a steward on the QE2, a lorry driver, a barman and just

Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel (13 March 1927 – 11 July 1958) was an American-born Scottish serial killer who is known to have murdered nine people across Lanarkshire and southern Scotland between 1956 and his arrest in January 1958, although he is suspected of having killed as many as eighteen. Prior to his arrest, the media nicknamed the unidentified killer the Beast of Birkenshaw. Manuel was hanged at Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison for his crimes on 11 July 1958; he was one of the last prisoners to die on the Barlinnie gallows.
Manuel was born in 1927 to Scottish parents in New York; the family moved to Detroit before emigrating back to Britain in 1932, this time to Birkenshaw in Lanarkshire. During his childhood, he was bullied; by the age of ten, he was known to the local police as a petty thief. At the age of sixteen, he committed a string of sexual attacks that resulted in his serving nine years in Peterhead Prison. He served further sentences for rape, before beginning his killing spree in 1956.
Although Manuel confessed while in custody to killing eighteen people, he was tried in 1958 for the murders of only eight people. One of the cases against him was thrown out of court;

Robert William "Willie" Pickton (born October 24, 1949) of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada is a former pig farmer and serial killer convicted of the second-degree murders of six women. He is also charged in the deaths of an additional twenty women, many of them prostitutes and drug users from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. In December 2007 he was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years —the longest sentence available under Canadian law for murder.
During the trial's first day of jury evidence, January 22, 2007, the Crown stated he confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover police officer posing as a cellmate. The Crown reported that Pickton told the officer that he wanted to kill another woman to make it an even 50, and that he was caught because he was "sloppy".
On February 6, 2002, police executed a search warrant for illegal firearms at the property owned by Pickton and his brother Dave Pickton. He was taken into custody and police then obtained a second court order to search the farm as part of the BC Missing Women Investigation, when personal items (including a prescription asthma inhaler) belonging to one of the missing women

Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish (May 19, 1870 – January 16, 1936) was an American serial killer. He was also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac and The Boogey Man. A child rapist and cannibal, he boasted that he "had children in every state," and at one time put the figure at around 100. However, it is not clear whether he was talking about rapes or cannibalization, less still whether he was telling the truth. He was a suspect in at least five murders in his lifetime. Fish confessed to three murders that police were able to trace to a known homicide, and he confessed to stabbing at least two other people. He was put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd, and was convicted and executed by electric chair.
He was born Hamilton Howard Fish in Washington, D.C. on May 19, 1870, to Ellen (1838-?) and Randall Fish (1795–October 16, 1875). His mother was born in Ireland. He said he had been named after Hamilton Fish, a distant relative. His father was 43 years older than his mother and 75 years old at the time of his birth. Fish was the youngest child and had three living siblings: Walter, Annie, and Edwin Fish. He wished to

Albert Henry DeSalvo (September 3, 1931 – November 25, 1973) was a criminal in Boston, Massachusetts, who confessed to being the "Boston Strangler", the murderer of thirteen women in the Boston area. DeSalvo was not imprisoned for these murders, however, but for a series of rapes. His murder confession has been disputed, and debate continues regarding which crimes DeSalvo actually committed.
DeSalvo was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to Frank and Charlotte DeSalvo. His father was of Italian ancestry and his mother was of Irish ancestry. His father was a violent alcoholic who at one point beat all of his wife's teeth out and bent her fingers back until they broke. He also forced his children to watch him have sex with prostitutes he brought home. DeSalvo tortured animals as a child and began shoplifting and stealing in early adolescence, frequently crossing paths with the law.
In November 1943, the 12-year-old DeSalvo was first arrested for battery and robbery. In December of the same year he was sent to the Lyman School for Boys. In October 1944, he was paroled and started working as a delivery boy. In August 1946, he returned to the Lyman School for stealing an automobile. After

Donald Harvey (born in Booneville, Kentucky, April 15, 1952) is an American serial killer who claims to have murdered 87 people. The official estimates of the number of people he murdered range anywhere from at least 37 to 57 deaths. Donald Harvey received some type of sadistic pleasure from killing his patients, although he claims he started out killing to “ease the pain” of patients. As he progressed in his murders, he began to enjoy it more and more and became a self-professed "Angel of Death". Harvey is currently serving 28 consecutive life sentences at the Allen Correctional Institution in Lima, Ohio. His inmate number is A-199449.
Dating as far back as the age of eighteen, Harvey had worked in and around the medical profession, beginning his career as an orderly at the Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. He later confessed that during the ten month period he worked at this hospital, he killed at least a dozen patients. Harvey is insistent that he killed purely out of a sense of empathy for the sufferings of those who were terminally ill. He has also admitted that many of the killings he committed were due to anger at the victim. Harvey is notable for having kept his

Gerald Eugene Stano (September 12, 1951 – March 23, 1998) was an American convicted serial killer. He killed at least 22 women; he confessed killing 41.
He was born in Schenectady, New York. His given name at birth was Paul Zeininger. His natural mother neglected him to such an extent that when she finally gave him up for adoption when he was six months old, county doctors declared him unadoptable because he was functioning at what they described as "an animalistic level", even ingesting his own faeces to survive. He was eventually adopted, however, by Norma Stano, a nurse, who renamed him Gerald Eugene Stano.
By all accounts, the Stanos were loving parents, but discipeline problems nevertheless plagued their adopted son all his life. He earned C's and D's in all subjects in school (except music, at which he excelled). He was a bed wetter until the age of 10. He lied compulsively and was once caught stealing money from his father's wallet to pay fellow members of the track and field team to finish behind him, so he would not be viewed as a complete failure. He graduated high school at the age of 21 and did not attend college.
Officially, Stano admitted that he began killing in the

Karla Leanne Homolka, also known as Karla Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais (born 4 May 1970 in Port Credit, Ontario, Canada), is a convicted Canadian serial killer. She attracted worldwide media attention when she was convicted of manslaughter following a plea bargain in the 1991 and 1992 rape-murders of two Ontario teenage girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, as well as the rape and death of her sister Tammy.
Homolka and Paul Bernardo, her husband and partner in crime, were arrested in 1993. In 1995, Bernardo was convicted of the two teenagers' murders and received life in prison and a dangerous offender designation, the full maximum sentence allowed in Canada. During the 1993 investigation, Homolka stated to investigators that Bernardo had abused her, and that she had been an unwilling accomplice to the murders. As a result, she struck a deal with prosecutors for a reduced prison sentence of 12 years in exchange for a guilty plea for manslaughter.
However, videotapes of the crimes were later found that demonstrated that she was a more active participant than she had claimed. As a result, the deal that she had struck with prosecutors was dubbed in the Canadian press the

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Russian: Андрей Романович Чикатило, Ukrainian: Андрі́й Рома́нович Чикати́ло; 16 October 1936 – 14 February 1994) was a Soviet serial killer, nicknamed The Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper, and The Rostov Ripper, who committed the murder of a minimum of 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990 in the Russian SFSR. Chikatilo confessed to a total of 56 murders and was tried for 53 of these killings in April 1992. He was convicted and sentenced to death for 52 of these murders in October 1992 and subsequently executed in February 1994.
Chikatilo was known by such titles as The Rostov Ripper and The Butcher of Rostov because the majority of his murders were committed in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.
Andrei Chikatilo was born in the village of Yablochnoye (Yabluchne) in modern Sumy Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR. He was born soon after the famine in Ukraine caused by Joseph Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture. Soviet farmers were forced to hand in their entire crop for statewide distribution. Mass starvation ran rampant throughout Ukraine and reports of cannibalism soared. Chikatilo's mother, Anna, told him that his older brother Stepan

Colin Ireland (16 March 1954 – 21 February 2012) was a British serial killer known as the "Gay Slayer" because he killed gay men.
While living in Southend, he started frequenting The Coleherne pub, a gay pub in west London. It was known as a place where men cruised for sexual partners and wore colour coded handkerchiefs that indicated their preferred role. Ireland sought men who liked the passive role and sadomasochism, so he could readily restrain them as they initially believed it was a sexual game.
Ireland said he was heterosexual — he had been married — and that he pretended to be gay only to befriend potential victims. It is unknown whether Ireland's murders were sexually motivated. Ireland was highly organised. He carried a full murder kit of rope and handcuffs and a full change of clothes to each murder. After killing the victim he cleaned the flat of any forensic evidence linking him to the scene and stayed in the flat until morning in order to avoid arousing suspicion from leaving in the middle of the night. Criminologist David Wilson stated that Ireland was a psychopath.
He was jailed for life for the murders in December 1993 and remained imprisoned until his death in

Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers (22 July 1630 – 17 July 1676) was a French serial killer.
Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray conspired with her lover, army captain Godin de Sainte-Croix to poison her father Antonine Dreux d'Aubray in 1666 and two of her brothers, Antoine d'Aubray and François d'Aubray, in 1670, in order to inherit their estates. There were also rumors that she had poisoned poor people during her visits to hospitals.
She appears to have used Tofana poison, whose recipe she seems to have learned from her lover, the Chevalier de Sainte Croix, who had learned it from Exili, an Italian poisoner, who had been his cellmate in the Bastille. Her accomplice Sainte-Croix had died of natural causes in 1672.
In 1675, she fled to England, Germany, and a convent, but was arrested in Liège. She was forced to confess and sentenced to death. On 17 July 1676, she was tortured with the water cure, that is, forced to drink sixteen pints of water. She was then beheaded and her body was burned at the stake.
Her trial and the attendant scandal launched the Affair of the Poisons, which saw several French aristocrats charged with poison and

Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. (born May 9, 1956) is a convicted American serial killer, incarcerated in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) system. Henley was convicted in 1974 for his role in a series of murders in Houston, Texas between 1970 and 1973 in which a minimum of 28 teenage boys were abducted, raped and murdered by Dean Corll. Many of the victims were lured to Corll's home by Henley or Corll's other teenage accomplice, David Brooks. Corll was shot dead by Henley, then 17 years old, on August 8, 1973.
Henley is serving six life sentences for his involvement in what came to be known as the Houston Mass Murders, which at the time were characterized as "the deadliest case of serial murders in American history".
Henley was born May 9, 1956 in Houston, Texas, the eldest of four sons born to Elmer Wayne Henley, Sr. and Mary Henley (née Weed). His father was an alcoholic and a wife-beater who also physically assaulted his sons, whereas his mother, although strict and religious, was nonetheless protective of her children and strove to ensure her children received a good education and refrained from trouble. The couple divorced in 1970 when Henley was 14. Henley's mother

Joachim Georg Kroll (17 April 1933 - 1 July 1991) was a German serial killer and cannibal. He was known as the Ruhr Cannibal (Ruhrkannibale), Ruhr Hunter (Ruhrjäger) and the Duisburg Man-Eater (Duisburger Menschenfresser). He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to a total of 14.
Born the son of a miner in Hindenburg (Zabrze), Province of Upper Silesia, Kroll was the 6th of 9 children. He was a weak child and used to wet the bed. His education was poor, only reaching Grade 3 (psychiatrists found he had an IQ of 76).
After the end of World War II, in which his father had become a prisoner of war, Kroll's family moved to North Rhine-Westphalia.
He began killing in 1955, after his mother died. Around 1960, Kroll went to Duisburg and found work as a toilet attendant for Mannesmann. Afterwards he worked for Thyssen Industries and went to 24 Friesen street, Laar, a district of Duisburg. At that time he resumed killing people.
Kroll was very particular about where he killed, only killing in the same place on a few occasions years apart. This, and the fact that there were a number of other killers operating in the area at the time, helped him to evade capture. Kroll would surprise

Michael Lupo (1953 – 12 February 1995) was a homosexual serial killer originally from Italy, operating in Britain. He was based at the YSL boutique in Brompton Road, London during the 1980s.
On March 15, 1986, a 37-year-old man named Alex Kasson was found murdered in a derelict flat in Kensington, London. The investigation did not make much progress because there were no obvious ties between killer and victim.
On April 6 that same year, Anthony Connolly, 24, was found murdered on a railway embankment in Brixton. He had been strangled to death with his own scarf. Because Connolly had been sharing a flat with a man who was HIV positive, there was a long delay between the discovery of the body and the post mortem because the coroner wanted to make sure Connolly was not himself infected with HIV. This created serious tensions between the authorities and the gay community, the latter accusing the former of dragging their heels and not taking the death of a gay man seriously enough.
Six weeks later, on May 18, Michele de Marco Lupo was arrested and charged with the murders of Connolly and Burns. Lupo, who ran a flower shop in Chelsea, was originally from Italy and was a former soldier.

Harvey Murray Glatman (December 10, 1927 – September 18, 1959) was an American serial killer active during the late 1950s. He was known in the media as "The Lonely Hearts Killer".
Born in the Bronx to a Jewish family and raised in Colorado, Glatman exhibited antisocial behavior and sadomasochistic sexual tendencies from an early age. At the age of 12, his parents noticed he had a red, swollen neck, he described being in the bathtub, placing a rope around his neck, running it through the tub drain, and pulling it tight against his neck, "achieving some kind of sexual pleasure from this act." His mother took him to the family physician and was told he "would grow out of it." As a teenager, he would break into women's apartments, where he tied them up, sexually molested them and took pictures as souvenirs. He was caught in one such act in 1945 and charged with attempted burglary. Less than a month later, while still out on bail awaiting trial, he kidnapped another woman and molested her before letting her go. She went to the police, and Glatman went to prison for eight months.
Once out of prison, Glatman moved to Albany, New York, where he was eventually arrested in 1946 for a series

James Michael Randall (born August 28, 1954) is an American criminal whose convictions include multiple rapes, a kidnapping, and the murder of two women in the Tampa Bay Area in Florida in the 1990s. Randall is currently an inmate in the Jackson Correctional Institute serving out two life sentences. Randall has been variously described as a "serial killer", despite only having two convictions for murder, and as a "notorious criminal".
Randall was a chief suspect in the 1984 death of Boston resident Holly Jean Cote, whose death by strangulation was never solved. Cote was a friend of Randall's then-wife, Linda Randall. Cote was last seen alive in the Gardner area of Massachusetts on March 4, 1984. Her body was found in early May in a marsh near Birch Hill Dam at Royalston. His suspected involvement in Cote's death is based on statements Randall made to his then-wife and to mental health workers during interactions he had with psychiatric services in late 1984, and on the fact that Cote's body was recovered in a fishing area Randall was known to frequent. Randall was never charged with an offence relating to Cote's death but evidence relating to the investigation was raised in the

The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor, with a third grave also being discovered there in 1987, over 20 years after Brady and Hindley's trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.
The police were initially aware of only three killings, those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.
Characterised by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain", Hindley made

Edward Joseph Leonski (December 12, 1917 – November 9, 1942) was an American spree killer who committed his crimes in Australia. Leonski is known as both the "Brownout Strangler", given Melbourne's wartime status of keeping low lighting (not as stringent as a wartime blackout) and also as the "Singing Strangler" due to his self confessed motive for the killings being a twisted fasination with female voices, especially when they were singing, and his claim that he killed the women to "get at their voices."
Born in New Jersey, Leonski grew up in an abusive, alcoholic family, and one of his brothers was committed to a mental institution.
He was called up for the U.S. Army in February 1941 and arrived in Melbourne on February 2, 1942.
On May 3, 1942, Ivy Violet McLeod, 40, was found dead in Albert Park, Melbourne. She had been beaten and strangled, and because she was found to be in possession of her purse it was evident that robbery was not the motive.
Just six days later, 31-year-old Pauline Thompson was strangled after a night out. She was last seen in the company of a young man who was described as having an American accent.
Gladys Hosking, 40, was the next victim, murdered on May

The Freeway Killer was a nickname given by the media—and later police forces—to what they believed was a single serial killer claiming victims in California, USA, during the 1970s and often dumping the victims along the freeways. However, there turned out to be three Freeway Killers who operated independently of each other, but just happened to select similar victims from similar locations. Initially, police did not believe these were the product of any serial killer, insisting the murders were isolated incidents.
The three killers were:
All three Freeway Killers selected young males as victims, often picking them up from roadside bars or hitch-hiking along the freeways. Their methods did vary; Bonin sexually assaulted the victims then killed them to prevent witnesses, Kearney shot his victims quickly then indulged in dismemberment and necrophilia, whilst Kraft was a sadist who tortured many of his victims after drugging them.
The trio of killers claimed at least 110 victims between them. None of them knew each other during their crime sprees, although Bonin and Kraft became acquainted while on Death Row.
Patrick Kearney killed a total 28 young boys and men. Bonin was convicted of

Dr Harold Fredrick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004) was an English doctor and one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history by proven murders with 250+ murders being positively ascribed to him.
On 31 January 2000, a jury found Shipman guilty of 15 murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and the judge recommended that he never be released.
After his trial, the Shipman Inquiry chaired by Dame Janet Smith, begun on 1 September 2000 and lasting almost two years, investigated all deaths certified by Shipman. About 80% of his victims were women. His youngest victim was a 41-year-old man. Much of Britain's legal structure concerning health care and medicine was reviewed and modified as a direct and indirect result of Shipman's crimes. Shipman is the only British doctor who has been found guilty of murdering his patients.
Shipman died on 13 January 2004, after hanging himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire.
Harold Frederick Shipman was born in Nottingham, England, the second of four children of Vera and Harold Shipman, a lorry driver. His working class parents were devout Methodists. Shipman was particularly close to his mother, who died

John Martin Crawford is a Canadian serial killer.
Crawford was sentenced in 1981 to 10 years imprisonment for manslaughter in the killing of Mary Jane Serloin, in Lethbridge, Alberta.
While under police surveillance, Crawford sexually assaulted Theresa Kematch, who was herself arrested, while Crawford was not.
Crawford was convicted in 1996 of killing three native women in Saskatoon in 1992, Eva Taysup, Shelley Napope, and Calinda Waterhen. He is currently serving three concurrent life sentences in Saskatchewan Penitentiary.
Crawford is discussed in Warren Goulding's book, Just Another Indian, A Serial Killer and Canada's Indifference with the message that crimes by marginalized minorities go unheeded by an uncaring society at large. The theory is posited that Crawford's case was played down by the media because his victims were Aboriginal women.

Miyuki Ishikawa (石川 ミユキ, Ishikawa Miyuki, born 1897, date of death unknown) was a Japanese midwife and serial killer who is believed to have murdered many infants with the aid of several accomplices throughout the 1940s. It is estimated that her victims numbered between 85 to 169, however the general estimate is 103. When she was finally apprehended, the Tokyo High Court's four-year sentence she received was remarkably light considering that Miyuki's actions resulted in a death toll so high that it remains unrivaled by any other serial killer in Japan. According to a report of Children's Rainbow Center, writer Kenji Yamamoto (山本健治, Yamamoto Kenji) referred to the incident as unbelievable and unbearable.
Ishikawa was born in Kunitomi, Miyazaki Prefecture and graduated from the University of Tokyo. She later married Takeshi Ishikawa. The relationship did not produce any children.
She worked as a hospital director in the Kotobuki maternity hospital (寿産院, Kotobuki San-in) and was an experienced midwife.
In the 1940s, there were many babies in her maternity hospital, and Miyuki Ishikawa found herself facing what she perceived to be something of a quandary. The parents of many of these

Myra Hindley (23 July 1942 – 15 November 2002) was an English serial killer convicted, along with her lover Ian Brady, of murdering children between 1963 and 1965 in the Moors murders. Brady was convicted on three counts of murder, Hindley on two counts of murder and one count of being an accessory to murder; both subsequently confessed to two additional murders.
Hindley was born in Crumpsall, Manchester, on 23 July 1942. After the birth of her younger sister, Maureen, in August 1946, she was sent to live with her grandmother Ellen Maybury, in nearby Gorton. It is believed that Hindley may have been physically abused by her alcoholic father, Bob Hindley, a paratrooper during World War II, who was also alleged to have been violent towards his wife, Nellie. Bob and Nellie Hindley divorced in 1965, around the time of Myra's arrest, and Nellie subsequently married a man named Bill Moulton.
Hindley attended the Ryder Brow Secondary Modern school, where she was in the top streams despite poor attendance. When Hindley was 15, her close friend Michael Higgins, 13, drowned in a reservoir. She had been asked, but had been unable, to go swimming with Higgins that day; she believed that she

Paul Kenneth Bernardo, also known as Paul Jason Teale (born 27 August 1964 in Scarborough, Ontario), is a Canadian serial killer and rapist, known for the sexual assaults and murders he committed with his wife Karla Homolka and the serial rapes he committed in Scarborough.
Bernardo's mother, Marilyn, was the daughter of a wealthy Toronto lawyer and his wife. His father, Kenneth, was the son of an English woman and an Italian immigrant who created a highly successful marble and tile business, but was abusive towards his wife and children. Instead of entering the family business, Kenneth Bernardo became an accountant. After her father had disapproved of an earlier boyfriend, Marilyn married Kenneth in 1960. Like his father, Kenneth Bernardo was said to be abusive. Marilyn, after having given birth to a son and a daughter, began seeing a former boyfriend. She became pregnant with his child and gave birth to Paul Kenneth Bernardo on August 27, 1964. Kenneth Bernardo tolerated his wife's affair and is listed as the biological father on Paul's birth certificate.
In 1975, Kenneth Bernardo fondled a girl and was charged with child molestation; he also sexually abused his own daughter.

Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo (November 1, 1962 – May 6, 1989) was an American serial killer, drug dealer and cult leader. His nickname was El Padrino de Matamoros (The Godfather of Matamoros).
Constanzo was born in Miami, Florida, USA. His mother was a Cuban immigrant. She gave birth to Adolfo at the age of 15, and eventually had three children of different fathers. She moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, after her first husband died, and she remarried there. Constanzo was baptized Catholic and served as an altar boy, but was also influenced by his mother in the religion called Palo Mayombe. The family returned to Miami in 1972, and his stepfather died soon after leaving the family with some money. His mother soon remarried and his new stepfather was involved in the religion and drug dealing.
Constanzo and his mother were arrested numerous times for minor crimes like theft, vandalism, and "farderismo” (shoplifting, concealing goods between their clothing). He graduated from high school but was expelled from prep school. His mother believed he had psychic abilities for supposedly having foretold the attempted assassination of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
As a teenager, he

Anthony Hardy (born 31 May 1951) is an English serial killer.
Born in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, Hardy had an apparently uneventful childhood and excelled in school and college, particularly in engineering.
He married and fathered three sons and one daughter, but his wife divorced him in 1986, accusing him of domestic violence. In 1982 Hardy had been arrested for trying to drown his wife, but the charges were later dropped.
After the divorce, Hardy spent time in mental hospitals, diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He lived in various hostels in London, picking up convictions for theft and being drunk and disorderly. He was arrested in 1998 when a prostitute accused him of raping her, but the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.
In January 2002 police were called to the block of flats where Hardy lived after a neighbour complained that someone had vandalised her front door and that she strongly suspected Hardy. When the police investigated Hardy's flat they found a locked door and, despite his claims to the contrary, police found that Hardy had a key. In the room the police found the naked dead body of a woman lying on a bed with cuts and bruises to her head. She was

Earle Leonard Nelson, aka The Gorilla Killer (May 12, 1897 – January 13, 1928), was an American serial killer.
Nelson's mother and father both died of syphilis before Nelson turned two. He was subsequently sent to be raised by his maternal grandmother, a devout Pentecostal. Around the age of 10, Nelson collided with a streetcar while riding his bicycle and remained unconscious for six days following the accident. After he awoke, his behavior became erratic and he suffered from frequent headaches and memory loss. When Nelson was 14, his grandmother died and Nelson went to live with his aunt, Lillian, and her husband.
Nelson began his criminal behavior early, an was sentenced to two years in San Quentin State Prison in 1915 after breaking into a cabin he believed to be abandoned. Later, he was committed to the Napa State Mental Hospital after behaving oddly and erratically during his short stint in the United States Navy. He managed to escape three times from the hospital before hospital staff stopped trying to find him.
Nelson began engaging in sex crimes when he was 21 years old. In 1921, Nelson attempted to molest a 12-year-old girl named Mary Summers but he was thwarted when she

Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, born Gesche Margarethe Timm (6 March 1785 - 21 April 1831), was a serial killer who murdered 15 people by arsenic poisoning in Bremen and Hanover, Germany, between 1813 and 1827. She was the last person to be publicly executed in the city of Bremen.
Gottfried's victims included her parents, her two husbands, her fiancé and her children. Before being suspected and convicted of the murders, she garnered widespread sympathy among the inhabitants of Bremen because so many of her family and friends fell ill and died. Because of her devoted nursing of the victims during their time of suffering, she was known as the "Angel of Bremen" until her murders were discovered.

Janie Lou Gibbs (December 25, 1932 – February 7, 2010) was a serial killer from Cordele, Georgia, who killed her three sons, a grandson, and her husband, by poisoning them with rat poison in 1966 and 1967.
Gibbs' husband of 18 years, Charles Clayton Gibbs, 39, died January 21, 1966. Her youngest son, Marvin Ronald Gibbs, 13, died August 29, 1966, followed by her middle son, Melvin Watess Gibbs, 16, on January 23, 1967. She inherited $31,000 from their deaths and tithed 10 percent to her church.
The deaths had previously been attributed to liver disease, but she was eventually arrested Christmas Eve 1967 after her oldest son, Roger Ludean Gibbs, 19, died in the same fashion as his father and brothers. On October 28, 1967, Roger's month-old son Ronnie Edward Gibbs also died under suspicious circumstances.
Despite the unusual coincidences of so many deaths in such a short period of time, she blocked insurance adjusters' requests for autopsies. Although insurance adjusters were suspicious, most of Gibbs' neighbors and friends from church could not believe that the 35-year-old mother and former farmer's wife who ran a day-care center could be a serial killer.
However, Gibbs'

Joseph Michael Swango (born October 21, 1954) is an American serial killer and former licensed physician. It is estimated that Swango has been involved in as many as 60 fatal poisonings of patients and colleagues, though he admitted to only causing four deaths. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and is serving that sentence at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
Swango was born in Tacoma, Washington and raised in Quincy, Illinois, the middle child of Muriel and John Virgil Swango. Swango's father was a career U.S. Army officer who served in the Vietnam War and was troubled by alcoholism. Upon his return from Vietnam, Swango's father became depressed and was divorced by Muriel.
Growing up, Swango saw little of his father and as a result, was closest to his mother.
Michael Swango was class valedictorian at his 1972 Quincy Catholic Boys High School graduation. During high school he played clarinet and was a member of the Quincy Notre Dame band. Although he attended a Catholic school, he was raised Presbyterian.
Swango served in the Marine Corps, graduating from recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego; he

Peter William Sutcliffe (born 2 June 1946) is a British serial killer who was dubbed "The Yorkshire Ripper". In 1981 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others. He is currently serving 20 sentences of life imprisonment in Broadmoor High Security hospital. After his conviction, Sutcliffe began using his mother's maiden name and became known as Peter William Coonan. The High Court dismissed an appeal in 2010, confirming that he would serve a whole life tariff and would never be released from imprisonment.
Sutcliffe was born in Bingley, to a working-class Catholic family in West Riding of Yorkshire, a son of John Sutcliffe (11 December 1922 - June 2004) and Kathleen Frances Sutcliffe (née Coonan, 22 January 1919 - 1978). Reportedly a loner at school, he left at the age of 15 and took a series of menial jobs, including two stints as a gravedigger during the 1960s. Between November 1971 and April 1973 Sutcliffe worked at the factory of Baird Television Ltd, on the packaging line. He left when he was asked to go on the road as a salesman.
After leaving Baird, he worked nightshifts at the Britannia Works of Anderton International from April 1973.

Aileen Carol Wuornos (February 29, 1956 – October 9, 2002) was an American serial killer who killed seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990. Wuornos claimed that her victims had either raped or attempted to rape her while she was working as a prostitute, and that all of the killings were committed in self-defense. She was convicted and sentenced to death for seven of the murders and was executed by the State of Florida by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.
Wuornos was born as Aileen Carol Pittman in Rochester, Michigan, on February 29, 1956. Her mother, Diane Wuornos (born 1939), was 15 years old when she married Aileen's father, Leo Dale Pittman (died 1969), on June 3, 1954. Less than two years later, and two months before Aileen was born, Diane filed for divorce. Aileen had an older brother named Keith, who was born in March 1955.
Wuornos never met her father, Leo Pittman. He was in prison for the rape and attempted murder of a seven-year-old girl when she was born. He was considered to be a schizophrenic, was convicted of sex crimes against children, was in and out of prison, and hung himself in prison in 1969. In January 1960, when Aileen was almost four years old, Diane

William "Billy" Gohl (February 6, 1873 – March 3, 1927) was an American serial killer who, while working as a union official, murdered sailors passing through Aberdeen, Washington. He murdered for an unknown period of time and was a suspect in dozens of murders until his capture in 1910. Spared from the death penalty by a request for leniency by the jury, he was sentenced to life in prison at Walla Walla State Penitentiary where he died in 1927 from lobar pneumonia and erysipelas complicated by dementia paralytic caused by syphilis.
Gohl was employed as a union official at the Sailor's Union of the Pacific. Before this he had been employed as a bartender after returning broke from the Yukon. Already an accomplished criminal, Gohl was suspected of being responsible for many of the large numbers of deceased migrant workers that were found washed up on shore during his tenure as a bartender, as well as a number of other crimes. In 1905 during the great waterfront strike Gohl was charged with "assembling men under arms" and is also alleged to to have forcibly abducted non-union crewmen from the schooner Fearless for which he was fined $1250 in the Superior Court. As a union official,

Caroline Grills, born Caroline Mickelson (1890 – October 1960), was an Australian serial killer.
Grills became a suspect in 1947 after the deaths of four family members: her 87-year-old stepmother Christine Mickelson; relatives by marriage Angelina Thomas and John Lundberg; and sister in law Mary Anne Mickelson. Authorities tested tea she had given to two additional family members (Christine Downey and John Downey) on 13 April 1953, and detected the poison thallium.
Grills appeared in court charged with four murders and three attempted murders (the third being Eveline Lundberg, Christine Downey's mother) in October 1953. She was convicted on 15 October 1953 and sentenced to death, but her sentence was later changed to life in prison. She became affectionately known as "Aunt Thally" to other inmates of Sydney's Long Bay prison. In October 1960, she was rushed to the hospital where she died from peritonitis from a ruptured gastric ulcer.

Carroll Edward Cole (May 9, 1938 – December 6, 1985), was an American serial killer who was executed in 1985.
Carroll Cole was born in Sioux City, Iowa. While his father went to fight in World War II, Cole was taken along by his mother and forced to watch as she had sexual encounters with men. She would often beat him to scare him into not telling his father. Even when his father returned home, Cole was frequently whipped and beaten by his mother for the most minor infractions, and he grew up with a deep hatred of women. He was also picked on at school for having a "girl's name", so he would usually go by his middle name, Eddie.
At the age of 8, Cole drowned a classmate of the same age in a lake. The boy's death was regarded as an accident until Cole confessed to it many years later.
After scraping through school with average grades, even with an I.Q. of 152, Cole became a drifter, doing menial jobs, drinking heavily and serving frequent prison sentences for crime such as burglary, vagrancy, arson and car theft. He attempted suicide at least once, and on a number of occasions, had himself committed to mental hospitals where he confessed his fantasies of murdering women. Although

Charlene Gallego and her husband Gerald Gallego terrorized Sacramento, California in the late 1970s, where they kidnapped and killed at least ten people, most of whom were teenage girls and were used as sex slaves before being murdered.
Gallego, Charlene

Christine Malèvre (born January 10, 1970) is a former nurse who was arrested in 1998 on suspicion of having killed as many as 30 patients. She confessed to some of the murders, but claimed she had done so at the request of the patients, who were all terminally ill. France, however, does not recognize a "right to die", and Malèvre eventually recanted most of her confessions. The families of several of her victims strongly denied that their relatives had expressed any will to die, much less asked Malèvre to kill them.
Malevre was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2003, for the murders of six patients, then to 12 years in appeal.

Peter Tobin (born 27 August 1946) is a convicted Scottish serial killer and sex offender now serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Edinburgh prison for the murders of three young women.
Prior to his first murder conviction, Tobin served ten years in prison for a double rape committed in 1993, following which he was released in 2004. In 2007, he was sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years for the rape and murder of Angelika Kluk in Glasgow in 2006. Skeletal remains of a further two young women who went missing in 1991 were subsequently found at his former home in Margate. Tobin was convicted of the murder of Vicky Hamilton in December 2008, when his minimum sentence was increased to 30 years and of the murder of Dinah McNicol in December 2009. Tobin has been labelled a psychopath by a senior psychologist, and by professor of criminology David Wilson, who also wrote a book on the killer connecting him with the Bible John murders of the late sixties.
Tobin was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, the second of eight children. He was a difficult child and in 1953, aged seven, he was sent to an approved school. He later spent time in a young offender institution, and in 1970 was

Phillip Carl Jablonski (born January 3, 1946) is an American serial killer convicted of killing five women in California and Utah between 1978 and 1991.
Jablonski grew up with an alcoholic father who beat and sodomized Jablonski's mother and sisters.
When he was 16, Jablonski attacked his 14-year-old sister by putting a rope around her neck and throwing her onto the bed. He had an erection and said, "I'm going to get some of that off of you." She thought he was going to rape her; however, he suddenly stopped and started to cry. When she told their parents, his father beat him.
Jablonski met his first wife, Alice McGowan, in high school. He joined the military after high school and was sent overseas. They married in 1968 when he returned to the U.S. While living in Texas, Jablonski became sexually violent. During sex he put a pillow over McGowan's face and attempted to suffocate her. On several occasions, he strangled her until she was unconscious.
Jablonski met Jane Sanders in November 1968, after McGowan left him. He raped Sanders on their first date, which she did not report. She became pregnant and they moved to California in July 1969, after Jablonski left the military. On one

Ottilie "Tillie" Klimek (or Tillie Gburek) (1876–1936) was a Polish American serial killer, active in Chicago. According to legend, she pretended to have precognitive dreams, accurately predicting the dates of death of her victims, when in reality she was merely scheduling their deaths. Actually, while contemporary accounts tell her cheerfully telling her husbands (and neighbors) that they were going to die, there is no record of her claiming to be a "psychic."
Born Otillie Gburek in Poland, and coming to the United States as an infant with her parents, Tillie married her original husband John Mitkiewicz, c. 1890. In 1914, he died after a short illness. The death certificate listed the cause of death as heart trouble, and she quickly remarried one Joseph Ruskowski, who lived nearby. He, too, died in short order, as did a boyfriend who had "jilted" her.
The crime for which she was eventually tried was the murder of Frank Kupzsyk, her third husband. He had taken ill in their apartment at 924 N. Winchester, where Tillie had previously lived with a boyfriend under the name of Meyers and she began to tell neighbors that Frank "would not live long.". She would mock Frank himself,

Abdul Latif Sharif (1947 – June 1, 2006), was an Egyptian chemist and chief suspect in the Juárez killings, a decade-long murder spree that began in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez in the early 1990s.
Sharif immigrated to the United States in 1970 to work as a high-paid research chemist for a series of U.S. companies, some of which are alleged to have shielded him from persistent accusations of rape and murder. Jailed for 12 years for rape in 1984, Sharif was released early for good behaviour in 1989, committed another rape, and fled to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, to escape a deportation hearing in El Paso, Texas. After the bodies of young women began to turn up in the desert surrounding Juárez, Sharif was arrested and imprisoned, serving a 60 year sentence for murder in a maximum-security jail in the state capital of Chihuahua, Chihuahua, where he eventually died of natural causes in a local hospital.
The murders have continued since Sharif's imprisonment & death.

Carl Panzram (June 28, 1891 – September 5, 1930) was an American serial killer, rapist, arsonist and burglar. He is known for his confession to his only friend, prison guard Henry Lesser. In graphic detail, Panzram confessed to 22 murders, and to having sodomized over 1,000 males. He used aliases such as "Carl Baldwin", "Jack Allen" and "Jefferson Baldwin" in Oregon; "Jeff Davis" in Idaho and Montana; "Jefferson Davis" in California and Montana; "Jeff Rhodes" in Montana; "John King"; and "John O'Leary" in New York.
Born Charles Panzram in Minnesota, the son of Prussian immigrants, Johann "John" and Matilda Panzram, he was raised on his family's farm. By his teens he was an alcoholic and was repeatedly in trouble with the authorities, often for burglary and theft. He ran away from home at the age of 14 and claimed to have been gang raped by a pack of hobos.
In adulthood, Panzram was a prolific thief, and was caught and imprisoned multiple times. While incarcerated, Panzram frequently got into trouble by attacking guards and refusing to follow their orders. The guards retaliated, subjecting him to beatings and other punishments. Panzram served a jail sentence from 1908 to 1910 at

Leszek Pękalski, also known as the Vampire of Bytów (born 12 February 1966 in Osieki near Bytów, Poland) is a Polish serial killer. He is believed to have killed at least 17 people between 1984 and 1992. At some stage of criminal procedures he admitted to having killed as many as 80 people, but he later retracted his confessions.
Nevertheless, due to problems with the collection of evidence, he was convicted for only one murder. As of 2007, he is serving a 25-year term in prison and is to be released in 2017.

David Michael Krueger (March 5, 1939 – March 5, 2010), best known by his birth name, Peter Woodcock, was a Canadian serial killer and child rapist who gained notoriety for the brutal murders of three young children in Toronto, Canada in 1956 and 1957 when he himself was still a teenager. He was subsequently diagnosed as a psychopath and placed in a psychiatric facility. Expensive treatment programs for Woodcock proved ineffective when he murdered a fellow psychiatric patient in 1991; after his death in 2010, he was dubbed by the Toronto Star as "The serial killer they couldn't cure".
Woodcock was born to a 17-year-old Peterborough factory worker who gave him up for adoption. He spent the first three years of his life in various foster homes; he was physically abused in at least one of those homes. He was later adopted by a wealthy family living near Yonge Street and Lawrence Avenue, who paid for a private school education, therapy and bikes for Woodcock. When he reached puberty, he began to travel around Toronto on his bike, fantasizing about becoming a gang leader and, in reality, sexually assaulting children in Parkdale and Cabbagetown. Ultimately, Woodcock would brutally murder

Randy Steven Kraft (born March 19, 1945) is an American serial killer convicted of murdering 16 young men between 1972 and 1983. He is strongly suspected of committing at least 51 other murders.
Kraft's parents moved to California from Wyoming prior to his birth. Born in Long Beach in 1945, he was the fourth child and the only son in his family. In 1948 the Kraft family moved to Midway City, California in neighboring Orange County. The Kraft's new family home in Midway City, the only one on the block at that time, was a small, wood-frame Women's Army Corps dormitory on Beach Boulevard that Kraft's father Harold turned into a three-bedroom house. Kraft's mother Opal served on the PTA at Kraft's school, Midway City Elementary, and baked cookies for Kraft's Cub Scout meetings. Beach Boulevard was expanded from two-lanes to four-lanes in 1954, when Kraft was 9, and the Kraft home and chicken farm eventually was sandwiched between a blacksmith shop and the Red Garter cocktail lounge, whose patrons often left used condoms in Kraft's backyard that Kraft was tasked to shovel up every Sunday morning after church. In sixth grade, Kraft attended accellerated classes at 17th Street Junior High

Vincent Johnson (born January 6, 1969), is an American serial killer popularly known as the Brooklyn Strangler.
Between the summers of 1999 and 2000, a series of murders of prostitutes in the Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods of Brooklyn led police to arrest a Brooklyn homeless man, one of roughly 30 known associates of prostitutes in the area detained for questioning, on suspicion of the murders. However, DNA testing definitively excluded the man as the killer.
After he was cleared as a suspect, the man befriended the officers of the Brooklyn North Homicide Task Force who were working the Brooklyn Strangler case. He told them of another homeless man in the area, with whom he frequently used crack cocaine, who seemed fixated on sadomasochistic sex. The man was subsequently able to identify this suspect, Vincent Johnson, 5'3" (1.6 m) and 130 lb (59 kg).
Johnson initially refused to provide a DNA sample to police, and denied knowing any of the women. However, one of the detectives had observed him spitting on the street, and Johnson's saliva was retrieved and given to the medical examiner for testing. Johnson's DNA matched that which was found on four of the victims.

Joseph Vacher (November 16, 1869 – December 31, 1898, Bourg-en-Bresse, Ain) was a French serial killer, sometimes known as "The French Ripper" or "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" ("The South-East Ripper") due to comparisons to the more famous Jack the Ripper murderer of London, England in 1888. His scarred face, accordion, and plain, white, handmade rabbit-fur hat became his trademark appearance.
The son of an illiterate farmer, young Joseph was sent to a very strict Catholic school, where he was taught to obey and to fear God. In 1893, while in military conscription, he fell in love with a young maidservant, Louise, who was not at all attracted to him. When his time in the army was over, he tried to woo her and propose to her for the last time before returning home, but she was bored by him and mocked him. In a rage, he shot her four times (she was badly injured, but survived) and then tried to commit suicide. Shooting himself twice in the head accomplished nothing more than paralyzing one side of his face (one of the bullets remained forever lodged in his skull) and putting him in a mental institution in Dole, Jura. Medical treatment did nothing for him, but the doctors released him as

Kendall Francois (born July 26, 1971) is a serial killer from Poughkeepsie, New York, convicted of killing eight women, from 1996 to 1998. He is currently serving life in prison for his crimes.
Francois was employed as a hall monitor at Arlington Middle School in Poughkeepsie, NY.
In October 1996, Wendy Meyers, age 30, was reported missing to the Town of Lloyd Police, in Ulster County, New York. She was described as a white female, with a slim build, hazel eyes and short brown hair. She was last seen at the Valley Rest Motel in Highland, a small town situated near the banks of the Hudson River south of Kingston.
In December 1996, Gina Barone was reported missing by her mother, Patricia Barone. Gina was 29 years old and had a small build, brown hair and an eagle tattooed on her back. On her right arm she had another tattoo that read simply “POP.” She was last seen November 29, 1996 in Poughkeepsie on a street corner, apparently having a dispute with an unidentified man.
In January 1997, Kathleen Hurley, 47, disappeared. She was last seen walking along Main Street in the downtown area of Poughkeepsie. Hurley, like the others, was white, had brown hair and a small build. The letters

Locusta was a Roman serial killer during the 1st century CE.
Locusta was born in the Roman province of Gaul. In CE 54, she may have been hired by Agrippina the Younger to kill the Emperor Claudius, possibly with a poisoned dish of mushrooms. In 55, she was convicted of poisoning another victim. When Nero learnt of this he sent a tribune of the Praetorian Guard to rescue her from execution. In return for this she was ordered to poison Britannicus. She succeeded on her second try, Nero rewarding her with immunity from execution while he lived, a vast estate, and even sending students to her. Seven months after Nero's suicide, Locusta was condemned to die by Galba in January 69. Apuleius described her life and she is mentioned by Suetonius. Juvenal also mentions Locusta in Book 1 of his Satires.
In The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas the poisoner Madame de Villefort is frequently compared to Locusta and one of the chapters is entitled 'Locusta'.

Peter Norris Dupas (born 6 July 1953) is an Australian serial killer, currently serving three consecutive life sentences for murder. His violent criminal history spans more than three decades, and with every release from prison has been known to commit further crimes against women with increasing levels of violence. His criminal signature is to remove the breasts of his female victims.
As of 2007, Dupas has been convicted of three murders and is a prime suspect in at least three other murders committed in the vicinity of the Melbourne area during the 1980s and 1990s.
Dupas was the youngest of three children, born into what has been described as "a fairly normal family". Born in Sydney, New South Wales, his family moved to Melbourne while he was still a toddler. With both siblings considerably older, his elderly parents treated him much like an only child. Dupas left high school upon completing Form 5, and later obtained his Higher School Certificate while in custody.
On 3 October 1968, at the age of 15, Dupas, still attending high school at Waverley High School in the eastern Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley, visited his next-door neighbour, requesting to borrow a knife for the

Timothy Wayne Krajcir (pronounced /ˈkraɪtʃər/)(born November 28, 1944) is a convicted American serial killer from West Mahanoy Township, Pennsylvania who has confessed to killing over nine women, five in Missouri and four others in Illinois and Pennsylvania.
After a stint of just fourteen months in the Navy, he was dishonorably discharged in 1963 for sexual assault. Krajcir first entered the Illinois prison system in 1963 on a rape conviction. Since then, he has spent most of his adult life behind bars for sex crimes, except for a brief period of freedom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Krajcir has been incarcerated since 1982.
Krajcir would travel to various towns that he had no connection to, stalk his victims, and then break into their homes and wait for them to arrive. In 1977, Krajcir was released from prison after serving time for rape when he enrolled at Southern Illinois University Carbondale as a condition of his parole. There, in 1981, he earned a degree in Administrative Justice with a minor in psychology.
Some victims were found tied up in their beds. Others were kidnapped and transported across state lines before they were killed. Most of them were raped or forced to

The Axeman of New Orleans was a serial killer active in New Orleans, Louisiana (and surrounding communities, including Gretna, Louisiana), from May 1918 to October 1919. Press reports during the height of public panic about the killings mentioned similar murders as early as 1911, but recent researchers have called these reports into question .
As the killer's pseudonym implies, the victims were attacked with an axe, which often belonged to the victims themselves . The common thread connecting each proposed axeman murder, is the manner by which the crimes were committed. In most cases, the back door of a home was smashed, followed by an attack on one or more of the residents with either an axe or straight razor. The crimes were evidently not conducted as robberies, as the criminal never removed items from his victims' homes.
The axe-man targeted a variety of victims, the majority of whom were Italian-American, leading many to believe that the crimes were racially motivated. Many media outlets sensationalized the quantity of Italian-American victims, going to far as to suspect Mafia involvement, despite the vast lack of evidence. Some crime analysts have suggested that the killings

Kristen Gilbert (born November 13, 1967 as Kristen Strickland in Fall River, Massachusetts) is an American serial killer who was convicted for three first-degree murders, one second-degree murder, and two attempted murders of patients admitted for care at the VAMC ("Veteran's Affairs Medical Center") in Northampton, Massachusetts. She killed her patients by injecting them with epinephrine, at the time a ward stock medication and a non-controlled substance, causing them to have heart attacks.
As a child, young Kristen Strickland exhibited a high scholastic aptitude. As she entered her teen years, friends and family took notice that she had become a habitual liar and was prone to neurotic behavior. She graduated from high school at age sixteen, graduated from Greenfield Community College, and received her certification as a registered nurse in 1988. Later that year, she married Glenn Gilbert. In 1989, she joined the staff of the VAMC in Northampton. She distinguished herself early on, and was featured in the magazine "VA Practitioner" in April, 1990.
Although other nurses noticed a high number of deaths on Gilbert's watch, they passed it off, jokingly calling her the "Angel of

Ahmad Suradji (10 January 1949 – 10 July 2008) was a serial killer in Indonesia. Suradji, a cattle-breeder born on 10 January 1949, was executed July 10, 2008. He was also known as Nasib Kelewang, or by his alias Datuk. He admitted to killing 42 girls and women over a period of 11 years. His victims ranged in age from 11 to 30, and were strangled with a cable after being buried up to their waists in the ground as part of a ritual. Suradji was arrested on May 2, 1997, after bodies were discovered near his home on the outskirts of Medan, the capital of North Sumatra. He buried his victims in a sugarcane plantation near his home, with heads of the victims facing his house, which he believed would give him extra power.
He told police that he had a dream in 1988 in which his father's ghost told him to kill 70 women and drink their saliva, so that he could become a mystic healer. As a sorcerer or dukun, women came to him for spiritual advice or on making themselves more beautiful or richer. His three wives—all sisters—were also arrested for assisting in the murders and helping to hide the bodies. One of his wives, Tumini, was tried as his accomplice. The trial began on December 11, 1997,

Friedrich Heinrich Karl "Fritz" Haarmann (October 25, 1879 – April 15, 1925), also known as the Butcher of Hanover and the Vampire of Hanover was a German serial killer who is believed to have been responsible for the murder of 27 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924. He was convicted, found guilty of 24 murders and executed.
Fritz Haarmann was born in Hanover in 1879, the sixth child of poor parents. Haarmann was a quiet child who shunned many boys' activities such as sports and preferred to play with his sisters' toys. He was also a poor student. At the age of 16, at the urging of his parents, Haarmann enrolled in a military academy at Neu Breisach. He initially adapted to military life, and performed well as a trainee soldier. After just one year in the academy, however, he began to suffer seizures and was discharged for medical reasons.
Haarmann returned to Hanover and took employment in a cigar factory. He was arrested in 1898 for molesting children, but a psychologist declared Haarmann was mentally unfit to stand trial, and he was sent to a mental institution indefinitely. Six months later, Haarmann escaped and fled to Switzerland, where he worked for two years before he

Luigi Chiatti (born February 27, 1968) is an Italian serial killer.
He was born Antonio Rossi from a 24-year-old single mother, Maria Rossi, a waitress in a restaurant. Just after he was born, his mother gave him to an orphanage run by the nuns in Narni, Umbria. At the age of six, he was adopted by Ermanno Chiatti and Giacoma Ponti, a wealthy family from Foligno.
He was arrested for the murder of Lorenzo Paolucci, 13, on August 8, 1993. He confessed to be the so-called "Monster of Foligno" who had already killed four-year-old Simone Allegretti, on October 4, 1992.
He is still detained in Spoleto high-security prison, and is serving a sentence of 30 years.

Alton Coleman (November 6, 1955 – April 26, 2002) was a spree killer. He was executed by the state of Ohio for the murder of 44-year-old Marlene Walters of Norwood, Ohio during a six-state killing spree in 1984.
Coleman received four death sentences from three Midwest states: Illinois, Ohio (twice) and Indiana. At the time of his execution he was the only condemned person in the country to have death sentences in three states. His partner in crime, Debra Denise Brown, was originally slated to be executed in Ohio, but in 1991 her death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Governor Richard Celeste. She still has a death sentence for the murder the duo committed in Indiana. However, Brown is serving her sentence, without possibility of parole, in the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
During the summer of 1984, 28-year-old Coleman and Brown, who was 21, embarked upon a killing spree through several Midwestern states. By the time the couple were caught, Coleman was charged or wanted for questioning in assaults on at least 20 people in 13 separate attacks, including seven murders. Almost all of the victims were African-American like Coleman and Brown. Some authorities have

David Brooks (born 1955) was the first of two known teenage accomplices of serial killer Dean Corll.
Brooks was born in Beaumont, Texas. His parents divorced when he was five. Afterwards, his time was divided between his father's home in Houston and that of his mother in Beaumont. In elementary school, Brooks was noted as an excellent student, but in junior high school his performance plummeted.
In 1970, Brooks met Corll.
It was only later on during the initial investigation of Corll's death that Brooks would shed light on to Corll's life. Brooks lured several victims to Deans house fully knowing what fate awaited them. Brooks was tried for the murders of four boys but was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison for the murder of Billy Ray Lawrence, 15, who was kept alive by Corll for four days before he was killed in June, 1973. Since then, he has been denied parole. Although Brooks was a key figure in luring several of the earlier victims for Corll, he was the one who introduced Corll to Elmer Wayne Henley, initialy as an intended victim, in 1971, Henley would not only kill many boys, but kill Corll himself. By 1972, Henley was Corlls major procurer, although Brooks still played

Michael Bruce Ross (July 26, 1959 – May 13, 2005) was an American serial killer. In 2005, he was executed by the state of Connecticut, making it the first execution in Connecticut (and the whole of New England) since 1960.
Ross was born in Putnam, Connecticut to Patricia Hilda Laine and Dan Graeme Ross. The oldest of four children, having two younger sisters and a younger brother, he grew up on a chicken farm in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Ross's home life was extremely dysfunctional; his mother, who had abandoned the family at least once and had been institutionalized, beat all four of her children, saving the worst for him. Some family and friends have suggested that he was also molested by his teenaged uncle, who committed suicide when Ross was six. He was a bright boy who performed well in school. He attended Killingly High School and later attended Cornell University, studied agricultural economics, and became an insurance salesman. He also exhibited antisocial behavior from a young age, however; he began stalking women in his sophomore year of college and, in his senior year, he committed his first rape. His first murder followed soon after.
Between 1981 and 1984, Ross murdered

Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus (born Weingarten) (5 May 1760 – 4 April 1836) was a German serial killer who is believed to have been responsible for poisoning her husband, aunt and lover, and of attempting to poison her servant. Her trial led to a method of identifying arsenic poisoning.
Sophie Weingarten was born in Glatz (now Kłodzku), a city in Lower Silesia, Prussia, the daughter of the secretary of the Austrian legation. Her father having lost his position, at the age of 19 she married the much older counselor of the Supreme Court Theodor Ursinus. She lived with him in Stendal until 1792 and afterwards in Berlin. Privy Counsellor Ursinus died there, suddenly, on 11 September 1800, a day after celebrating his birthday. His wife came under suspicion for not summoning a doctor, after the medicine she administered to him made his condition worse.
During her marriage Sophie had started an affair with a Dutch officer named Rogay, possibly with the consent of her elderly husband. He left Berlin for a time, but later returned and died three years before her husband. At the time his death was attributed to tuberculosis. It was later discovered that shortly before his death Sophie

Martha Ann Johnson (also known as Martha Ann Bowen) (born 1955) is an American serial killer from Georgia convicted of smothering to death three of her children between 1977 and 1982.
Johnson was in her third marriage by the age of 22. Her first marriage produced a girl, born in 1971. Her second marriage produced a son in 1975 and her third marriage, to Earl Bowen, produced a son and daughter, born 1979 and 1980, respectively.
On September 23, 1977, Johnson claimed 23-month-old James William Taylor was unresponsive when she attempted to wake him up from his nap. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The cause of death was determined to be sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
On November 30, 1980, Johnson claimed her three-month-old daughter Tabitha Jenelle Bowen was blue when she went to wake her up from a nap. Paramedics were unable to revive Tabitha, and her death was also attributed to SIDS.
In January 1981, 31-month-old Earl Wayne Bowen was found with a package of rat poison. He was treated and release from the hospital, after which his parents claimed he began to have seizures. On February 12, 1981, Earl went into cardiac arrest while being taken to the

Tsutomu Miyazaki (宮﨑 勤, Miyazaki Tsutomu, August 21, 1962 – June 17, 2008), also known as The Otaku Murderer, The Little Girl Murderer and Dracula, was a Japanese serial killer.
Miyazaki's premature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled and fused directly to the wrists, necessitating him to move his entire forearm in order to rotate the hand. Due to his deformity, he was ostracized when he attended Itsukaichi Elementary School, and consequently kept to himself. Although he was originally a star student, his grades at Meidai Nakano High School dropped dramatically; he had a class rank of 40 out of 56 and did not receive the customary admission to Meiji University. Instead of studying English and becoming a teacher as he originally intended, he attended a local junior college, studying to become a photo technician.
Between 1988 and 1989, Miyazaki mutilated and killed four girls, aged between four and seven, and sexually molested their corpses. He drank the blood of one victim and ate a part of her hand. These crimes—which, prior to Miyazaki's apprehension and trial were named "The Little Girl Murders", and later known as the Tokyo/Saitama Serial

Beverley Gail Allitt (born 4 October 1968) is an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering four children, attempting to murder three other children, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six children. The crimes were committed over a period of 59 days between February and April 1991 in the children's ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, where Allitt was employed as a State Enrolled Nurse. She administered large doses of insulin to at least two victims and a large air bubble was found in the body of another, but police were unable to establish how all the attacks were carried out. In May 1993, at Nottingham Crown Court, she received 13 life sentences for the crimes. Mr. Justice Latham, sentencing, told Allitt that she was "a serious danger" to others and was unlikely ever to be considered safe enough to be released. She is detained at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire.
Allitt had attacked thirteen children, four fatally, over a 59 day period before she was brought up on charges for her crimes. It was only following the death of Claire Peck that medical staff became suspicious of the number of cardiac arrests on the children's ward and

Bible John is the nickname of a serial killer who murdered three young women after meeting them at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, Scotland between 1968 and 1969. As of 2012, the killer has never been identified although the known movements and modus operandi of convicted serial killer Peter Tobin suggests that he may have been behind the killings. This has never been proven.
On 23 February 1968, the body of 25-year-old Patricia Docker was found in Carmichael Place in Glasgow. She had been strangled. The previous night, she had told her parents that she was going out dancing at a nearby club, the Majestic Ballroom in Hope Street, Glasgow. Patricia had, in fact, gone to the Barrowland Ballroom for the over-25s night. It was not until about eight weeks after Docker's killing that the police found out that she had actually gone to the Barrowlands. By that time, memories had faded. Pat's handbag was missing from the murder scene, although it was later found dumped in the River Clyde, suggesting that the killer may have been from that area of the city.
On 15 August 1969, mother of three, Jemima McDonald, 32, also went for a night out at the Barrowland Ballroom. The next day,

Donald Neilson (1 August 1936 – 18 December 2011), born Donald Nappey and also known as the "Black Panther", was a British multiple murderer and armed robber. Following three murders committed during robberies of sub-post offices from 1971 to 1974, his last victim was Lesley Whittle, an heiress from Highley, Shropshire, England, in early 1975. He was arrested later that year and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976, remaining in prison until his death 35 years later.
Neilson, known previously as Donald Nappey, married 20-year-old Irene Tate in April 1955 at the age of 18. His wife persuaded him to leave the army where he was serving as a national serviceman in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
Their daughter, Kathryn, was born in 1960.
After his daughter's birth, Nappey changed the family name to Neilson so that the little girl would not suffer the bullying and abuse he had endured at school and in the army because of his surname's similarity to the word nappy.
He was also bullied because of his short stature, five feet six inches.
According to David Bell and Harry Hawkes, Nappey bought a taxi business from a man named Neilson and decided to use that name instead of the

Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861 – May 7, 1896), better known under the alias of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was one of the first documented American serial killers in the modern sense of the term. In Chicago at the time of the 1893 World's Fair, Holmes opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind, and which was the location of many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which four were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as 200. He took an unknown number of his victims from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was less than two miles away, to his "World's Fair" hotel.
The case was notorious in its time and received wide publicity through a series of articles in William Randolph Hearst's newspapers. Interest in Holmes's crimes was revived in 2003 by Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, a best-selling non-fiction book that juxtaposed an account of the planning and staging of the World's Fair with Holmes's story. His story had been previously chronicled in The Torture Doctor by David Franke (1975), Depraved: The Shocking True Story of

Kenneth Alessio Bianchi (born May 22, 1951) is an American serial killer. Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, Jr., together are known as the Hillside Stranglers. He is serving a term of life imprisonment in Washington. Bianchi is also a suspect in the Alphabet murders, three unsolved murders in his home city of Rochester.
Bianchi was born in Rochester, New York, to a prostitute who gave him up for adoption two weeks after he was born. He was adopted at three months by Frances Scioliono and her husband Nicholas Bianchi in Rochester.
Bianchi was deeply troubled from a young age, and his adoptive mother described him as being "a compulsive liar who had risen from the cradle dissembling". He often worried her with his penchant for trance-like daydreams. Despite having above-average intelligence, he was an underachiever who was quick to lose his temper. He was diagnosed with petit mal seizures when he was five years old and passive-aggressive disorder when he was 10. After Nicholas' death from pneumonia in 1964, Frances had to work while her son attended high school. Frances is known for keeping Bianchi home from school for long periods of time. Bianchi would make frequent trips to the

Peter Stumpp (died 1589) (whose name is also spelt as Peter Stube, Pe(e)ter Stubbe, Peter Stübbe or Peter Stumpf) was a German farmer, accused of being a serial killer and a cannibal, also known as the "Werewolf of Bedburg".
The most comprehensive source on the case is a pamphlet of 16 pages published in London in 1590, the translation of a German print of which no copies have survived. The English pamphlet, of which two copies exist (one in the British Museum and one in the Lambeth Library), was rediscovered by occultist Montague Summers in 1920. It describes Stumpp’s life and alleged crimes and the trial, and includes many statements from neighbors and witnesses of the crimes. Summers reprints the entire pamphlet, including a woodcut, on pages 253 to 259 of his work The Werewolf.
Additional information is provided by the diaries of Hermann von Weinsberg, a Cologne alderman, and by a number of illustrated broadsheets, which were printed in southern Germany and were probably based on the German version of the London pamphlet. The original documents seem to have been lost during the wars that swept over the Rhineland in the centuries that followed.
Peter Stumpp's name is also spelt

Robert Christian Hansen (born on February 15, 1939) is an American serial killer. Between 1980 and 1983, Hansen murdered between 17 and 21 women near Anchorage, Alaska. He was convicted in 1983 and is currently serving 461 years in Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Alaska.
Hansen was born in Estherville, Iowa to Christian and Edna Hansen. Throughout childhood and adolescence, Hansen was described as being quiet and a loner, and had a dysfunctional relationship with his domineering father. He was frequently bullied at school for his perpetual acne and his severe stutter. In 1957, Hansen enlisted in the United States Army Reserve and served for one year before being discharged. He later worked as an assistant drill instructor at a police academy in Pocahontas, Iowa. In Pocahontas, Hansen began a relationship with a late adolescent girl and married in the summer of 1960.
On December 7 of that year, he was arrested for burning down a Pocahontas County Board of Education school bus garage, for which he served 20 months of a three-year prison sentence in Anamosa State prison. His wife filed for divorce against him while he was incarcerated. Over the next few years, he was

William Lester Suff (born August 20, 1950, as Bill Lee Suff), also known as the Riverside Prostitute Killer and the Lake Elsinore Killer, is an American serial killer.
In 1974, a Texas jury convicted Suff and his then-wife, Teryl, of beating their two-month-old daughter to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later reversed Teryl’s conviction but upheld Suff's in Suff v. State (Tex. 1976) 531 S.W.2d 814, finding insufficient evidence to convict her as either the primary actor or a principal in their baby's murder. Though Suff was sentenced to 70 years in a Texas prison, he served only 10 years before his 1984 release on parole.
He subsequently raped, stabbed, strangled, and sometimes mutilated 12 or more prostitutes in Riverside County, beginning in 1986. On January 9, 1992, Suff was arrested after a routine traffic stop.
Described as a mild-mannered loner, Suff worked as a county stock clerk who allegedly delivered supplies to the task force investigating his killing spree. He liked to impersonate police officers and cooked chili at office picnics. In fact, it was alleged that he used the breast of one of his victims in his chili, which won the "Riverside County Employee

Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer and mass murderer who murdered ten people in Sedgwick County (in and around Wichita, Kansas), between 1974 and 1991.
He is known as the BTK killer (or the BTK strangler). "BTK" stands for "Bind, Torture, Kill", which was his infamous signature. He sent letters describing the details of the killings to police and to local news outlets during the period of time in which the murders took place.
After a long hiatus in the 1990s through early 2000s, Rader resumed sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent conviction. He is serving 10 consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility, with an earliest possible release date of February 26, 2180.
Rader is the oldest of four sons. Though born in Pittsburg, Kansas, he grew up in Wichita. According to several reports, including his own confessions, as a child he tortured animals. He also harbored a sexual fetish for women's underwear and would later steal underpants from his victims and wear them himself. Rader attended Kansas Wesleyan University from 1965 to 1966. He subsequently spent four years (1966–1970) in the U.S. Air Force.
When he

Alexander Yuryevich "Sasha" Pichushkin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ю́рьевич Пичу́шкин, born 9 April 1974 in Mytishchi, Moscow Oblast), also known as The Chessboard Killer and The Bitsa Park Maniac, is a Russian serial killer. He is believed to have killed at least 49 people and up to 61–63 people in southwest Moscow's Bitsa Park, where several of the victims' bodies were found.
Pichushkin is remembered to have been an initially sociable child. However, this changed following an incident in which Pichushkin fell backwards off a swing and was subsequently struck in the forehead by said swing as it swung backwards. Experts have speculated that this event caused damage to the frontal cortex of Pichushkin's brain, which is known to produce poor regulation of impulses and a tendency towards aggression. It is also likely that this happened as a child's forehead has been proved only 1/8 as protective of the brain as an adult's. Indeed, following this accident, Pichushkin became hostile and impulsive frequently and his mother therefore decided to transfer him from mainstream school to one for those with learning disabilities. As a result, children from mainstream school began to physically and

Andrew Phillip Cunanan (August 31, 1969 – July 23, 1997) was an American spree killer who murdered at least five people, including fashion designer Gianni Versace, during a three-month period in 1997, ending with his own suicide, at age 27. On June 12, 1997, Cunanan became the 449th fugitive to be listed by the FBI on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Cunanan was born in National City, California, to Modesto Cunanan, a Filipino American, and Mary Anne Shilacci, an Italian American. He was the youngest of four children. Modesto Cunanan could not attend his son's birth, as he was serving in the US Navy in the Vietnam War at the time.
In 1981, his father enrolled him in The Bishop's School in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California. At school, Cunanan was remembered as being bright and very talkative, testing with an I.Q. of 147. As a teenager, he developed a reputation as a prolific liar given to telling fantastic tales about his family and personal life. He was also adept at changing his appearance according to what he felt was most attractive at a given moment.
After graduating from high school in 1987, he enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, where

George Joseph Smith (11 January 1872 – 13 August 1915) was an English serial killer and bigamist. In 1915 he was convicted and subsequently hanged for the slayings of three women, the case becoming known as the "Brides in the Bath Murders". As well as being widely reported in the media, the case was a significant case in the history of forensic pathology and detection. It was also one of the first cases in which similarities between connected crimes were used to prove deliberation, a technique used in subsequent prosecutions.
The son of an insurance agent, George Joseph Smith was born in Bethnal Green, London. He was sent to a reformatory at Gravesend, Kent at the age of nine and later served time for swindling and theft. In 1896, he was imprisoned for 12 months for persuading a woman to steal from her employers. He used the proceeds to open a baker's shop in Leicester.
In 1898, he married Caroline Beatrice Thornhill (under another alias, Oliver George Love) in Leicester; it was his only legal marriage (although he also married another woman bigamously the following year). They moved to London, where she worked as a maid for a number of employers, stealing from them for her

Maria Gruber, Irene Leidolf, Stephanija Meyer, and Waltraud Wagner (Born 1960) made up one of the most unusual crime teams in 20th Century Europe. The four Austrian women were nurses working at Lainz General Hospital in Vienna, and together murdered scores of patients.
Wagner, 23, was the first to kill a patient with an overdose of morphine in 1983. She discovered in the process that she enjoyed playing God and holding the power of life and death in her hands. She recruited Gruber, 19, and Leidolf, 21, and eventually the "house mother" of the group, 43-year-old Stephanija Meyer.
However, lethal injection didn't provide enough excitement, and soon the self-styled "death pavilion" had invented their own murder method: while one held the victim's head and pinched their nose, another would pour water into the victim's mouth until they drowned in their bed. Since elderly patients frequently had fluid in their lungs, it was an unprovable crime.
They were caught after they were overheard bragging about their latest murder at a local tavern. In total, they confessed to 49 murders over six years, but may have been responsible for as many as 200.
Wagner was convicted of 15 murders, 17

Jane Toppan (1857–1938), born Honora Kelley, was an American serial killer. She confessed to 31 murders in 1901. She is quoted as saying that her ambition was "to have killed more people — helpless people — than any other man or woman who ever lived...".
Though scant records survive of Toppan's early years, it is known that her parents were Irish immigrants, and her mother, Bridget Kelley, died of tuberculosis when she was very young. Her father, Peter Kelley, was well known as an alcoholic and eccentric, nicknamed by those who knew him "Kelley the Crack" (crack as in "crackpot"). In later years Kelley would become the source of many local rumors concerning his supposed insanity, the most popular of which being that his madness finally drove him to sew his own eyelids closed while working as a tailor. As with all rumors and legends, the story's authenticity is dubious, but it accurately reflects the prevailing opinion of Peter Kelley as an extremely unbalanced person.
In 1863, only a few years after his wife's death, Kelley brought his two youngest children, the eight-year-old Delia Josephine and six-year-old Honora, to the Boston Female Asylum, an orphanage for indigent female

Jürgen Bartsch (November 6, 1946 in Essen – April 28, 1976 in Eickelborn; original name Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski) was a West German serial killer who murdered four children and attempted to kill another.
Bartsch was born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski in 1946 as an illegitimate child in Essen. His birth mother died of tuberculosis soon afterward, and he spent the first months of his life being cared for by nurses, until at 11 months he was adopted by a butcher and his wife in Langenberg (today Velbert-Langenberg). From then on he was called Jürgen Bartsch. Bartsch's adoptive mother, who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, was fixated on cleanliness. He was not permitted to play with other children, lest he become dirty. This continued into adulthood; his mother personally bathed him until he was 19. At the age of 10, Bartsch entered school. Because, in his parents' opinion, it was not sufficiently strict, he was moved to a Catholic boarding school.
Bartsch began killing at the age of fifteen. His first victim was Klaus Jung who was murdered in 1961. His next victim was Peter Fuchs who was killed four years later in 1965. He persuaded all of his victims to accompany him into an

Kenneth Erskine (born July 1963) is an English serial killer who became known as the Stockwell Strangler.
Erskine was born in July 1963 to an English mother and Antiguan father. He was abandoned by both parents during childhood and attended various special schools.
Erskine's criminal career began with a number of burglaries, and he was able to open ten separate bank accounts with the proceeds of his crimes.
During 1986, Erskine murdered at least seven elderly people, breaking into their homes and strangling them; most often they were sexually assaulted. The crimes took place in London.
His first victim was Mrs Eileen Emms (78), of Wandsworth, who died on 9 April 1986. Her death was originally not believed to have been murder, and it was only established that she had been murdered when a television set was detected missing from her flat. A post mortem examination revealed that she had been raped and strangled.
His second victim was Mrs Janet Cockett (67), who died on 9 June 1986 after being strangled in her flat on the Wandsworth housing estate on which she was chairwoman of the tenants association. Erskine's palm print was found on a window at Mrs Cockett's flat.
On 28 June 1986,

Enriqueta Martí i Ripollés (Sant Feliu de Llobregat 1868 – Barcelona 12 May 1913) was a Spanish child murderer, kidnapper and procuress of children.
As a young woman, Enriqueta moved from her hometown of Sant Feliu de Llobregat to Barcelona where she worked as a maidservant and nanny, but soon she turned to prostitution, both in brothels and in places dedicated to this activity, like the Port of Barcelona or the Portal de Santa Madrona. In 1895 she married a painter called Joan Pujaló, but the marriage failed. According to Pujaló Enriqueta's affairs with other men, her strange, false, unpredictable character, and her continuous visits to houses of disrepute caused the separation. In spite of marriage, she continued to visit locales of prostitution and people of doubtful virtue. The pair reconciled and separated approximately six times. At the time of Enriqueta's detention in 1912 the couple had been separated for five years and had not had children.
Enriqueta was leading a double life. During the day she dressed in rags and begged at houses of charity, convents and parishes in the destitute parts of town where she selected children who looked the most abandoned. Taking the children

Ottis Elwood Toole (March 5, 1947 – September 15, 1996) (sometimes misspelled Otis) was an American serial killer, arsonist, cannibal, and necrophile. He was a brief accomplice of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. Toole admitted to multiple counts of murder, necrophilia, arson and cannibalism, and was the suspect in several unsolved crimes. He recanted and restated a number of confessions. Toole was convicted of six counts of murder, and confessed to four more murder charges before dying in prison.
Toole was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. Toole's mother was a religious fanatic; Toole later claimed that she abused him, including dressing him in girl's clothing and calling him Susan. His father was an alcoholic who abandoned him. As a young child, Toole was a victim of sexual assault and incest at the hands of many close relatives and acquaintances, including his older sister and next door neighbor. He claimed that his maternal grandmother was a Satanist, who exposed him to various Satanic practices and rituals in his youth, including self-mutilation and graverobbing, and dubbed him "Devil's Child". Toole claimed this abuse began when he came out about being gay.

William Richard "Bill" Bradford (1948–2008) was an American murderer who was incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison for the 1984 murders of his 15-year-old neighbor Tracey Campbell and barmaid Shari Miller. In July 2006, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department released a compilation of photos found in Bradford's apartment in the 1980s, depicting 54 different women in modelling poses. As Bradford had used the promise of a modelling career to lure his victims, and taken pictures of Miller before murdering her, police believe that Bradford was in fact a serial killer and that the photos depict Bradford's other victims in the moments before their deaths. Bradford died at the Vacaville prison medical facility on March 10, 2008, of natural causes.
In July 1984, while out on bail and awaiting trial for rape, Bradford met Shari Miller, a barmaid at a Los Angeles establishment called "The Meet Market". Bradford told her that he was a professional photographer and offered to help her build a modelling portfolio. He took her to a remote campsite in the deserts north of Los Angeles (which was the site of the alleged rape for which Bradford was awaiting trial), photographed her in a

Gilbert Paul Jordan (December 12, 1931 – July 7, 2006), known as the "Boozing Barber", was a Canadian serial killer who is believed to have committed the so-called "alcohol murders" in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Jordan, a former barber, was linked to the deaths of between eight and ten women between 1965 and 1988; he was the first Canadian to use alcohol as a murder weapon. Jordan's lengthy criminal record started in 1952 and includes convictions for rape, indecent assault, abduction, hit and run, drunk driving and car theft.
In 1976, Jordan was examined by Dr. Tibor Bezeredi as part of a court proceeding. Dr. Bezeredi diagnosed Jordan as having an anti-social personality, defined by Dr. Bezeredi as "a person whose conduct is maladjusted in terms of social behaviour; disregard for the rights of others which often results in unlawful activities".
Jordan is considered a serial killer as he was linked to the deaths of between eight and ten women, but was only convicted in the manslaughter death of one woman. His victims were Aboriginal women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Typically he would find women in bars, and buy them drinks, or pay them for sex and encourage them to

John Childs is a British murderer who killed six people between 1974 and 1978. Childs was a professional criminal and contract killer, although he surpassed many gangland hitmen in sheer brutality.
Terry (Teddy) Eve was killed in August 1974. Terry was beaten with a piece of pipe and an axe before Childs strangled him to death. Robert Brown - was killed in January 1975. Robert was shot 3 times then axed and stabbed with a knife and a sword. George Brett and Terry Brett murdered in November 1975, were father and son, both victims were shot in the head. Freddie Sherwood was killed in July 1978, he was also shot in the head. Ronald Andrews was killed in October 1978, shot in the head.
Childs burnt the body of each victim in the fireplace of his London home. Childs had tried to mince the body and dispose of it down the toilet. This proved to be impossible so the bodies were dismembered with a saw and a wooden mallet, before incinerating them. Detectives reconstructed this burning using an 11-stone pig to prove it was possible.
Childs claimed to have worked with Harry McKenney and Terry Pinfold and the trio were sentenced to life imprisonment, McKenney and Pinfold were recommended to

John Thomas Straffen (27 February 1930 – 19 November 2007) was a British serial killer who was the longest-serving prisoner in British legal history. Straffen killed two young girls in the summer of 1951. He was found to be unfit to plead and committed to Broadmoor Hospital; during a brief escape in 1952 he killed again. This time he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Reprieved because of his mental state, he had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment and he remained in prison until his death more than 55 years later.
Straffen's father, John Senior, was a soldier in the British Army. He was the third child in the family; his older sister was regarded as a "high grade mental defective" who died in 1952. Straffen was born at Bordon Camp in Hampshire where his father was then based, but at the age of two his father was posted abroad and the family spent six years in India. Returning to Britain in March 1938, Straffen's father took a discharge from the Army and the family settled in Bath, Somerset.
In October 1938 Straffen was referred to a Child Guidance Clinic for stealing and truancy. In June 1939 he first came before a Juvenile Court for stealing a purse from a

Robert Andrew "Bob" Berdella (January 31, 1949 – October 8, 1992) was an American serial killer in Kansas City, Missouri who raped, tortured and killed at least six men between 1984 and 1987.
Berdella was enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute from 1967 to 1969. During this time he was convicted but received a suspended sentence for selling amphetamines. He was later arrested for possession of LSD and marijuana, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. In 1969 he bought the house at 4315 Charlotte, which would be the scene of the crimes. He worked as a chef and eventually opened Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar, a novelty shop that catered to occult-type tastes.
Berdella was apprehended on April 2, 1988, after a victim he had been torturing for a week jumped naked from the second story of his house and escaped, wearing only a dog collar. By that time, he had abducted and tortured at least six young men, and the Kansas City Police Department suspected him in two other disappearances. Berdella had detailed torture logs and large numbers of Polaroid pictures he had taken of his victims. Volumes of pictures were recovered by the Kansas City Police Department, and remain in their

Béla Kiss (1877 – ?) was a Hungarian serial killer. He is thought to have murdered at least 24 young women and attempted to pickle them in giant metal drums that he kept on his property.
Béla Kiss was a tinsmith who had lived in Cinkota (a town near Budapest) since 1900. He was an amateur astrologer and allegedly fond of other occult practices. In 1912 Kiss hired a housekeeper, began to correspond with a number of attractive women and sometimes took them to his home in Cinkota. However, his housekeeper, a Mrs. Jakubec, never really got to know any of them.
Townsfolk also noticed that Kiss had collected a number of metal drums. He had told the town police who questioned him that he filled them with gasoline in order to prepare for the rationing of the oncoming war. When World War I began, he was conscripted and left his house in Jakubec's care.
In July 1916, Budapest police received a call from a Cinkota landlord who had found seven large metal drums. The town constable had remembered Kiss' stockpile of gasoline, and led needy soldiers to them. Upon attempting to open the drums, a suspicious odour was noted. Detective Chief Charles Nagy took over the investigation and opened one of

Carol M. Bundy (August 26, 1942 – December 9, 2003) was an American serial killer. Bundy and Doug Clark became known as "The Sunset Strip Killers" after being convicted of a series of murders in Los Angeles during the late spring and early summer of 1980. The victims were young prostitutes or runaways.
Bundy, a divorcee with two children living in the San Fernando Valley, went to police claiming that her lover, Clark, had told her he had killed several young women. All had been shot with a gun Bundy had purchased. Bundy claimed initially that she knew nothing of the murders, "only what (Clark) told me".
Shortly before going to police, Bundy, who worked as a nurse, had shot to death, stabbed and beheaded another lover, Jack Murray. Bundy eventually confessed to that murder but claimed it was self-defense. Later, Bundy also admitted that she had been present during one of the murders for which Clark was charged. That murder took place in a car parked behind a gas station in East Hollywood. Bundy claimed Clark shot a prostitute in the head while the prostitute was in the act of fellatio. Bundy had hired the girl for Clark's birthday. Clark insisted Bundy was the shooter. Both agreed

Lemuel Warren Smith (born July 23, 1941), is a convicted serial killer and rapist from Upstate New York who was the first convict ever to kill an on-duty female corrections officer.
Lemuel Smith was born in Amsterdam, New York in a very religious African-American household. During later insanity claims, Smith stated that when he was 11 years old, he nearly smothered a nine-year-old girl to death. This claim was not substantiated, however.
On January 21, 1958, Dorothy Waterstreet was robbed and beaten to death near Smith's neighborhood in Amsterdam, New York. Evidence pointed towards the 16-year-old Smith, but the case fell apart when the district attorney was too hasty in trying to extract a confession, and Smith was not arrested.
During the following summer, while under continuing pressure from Amsterdam police, Smith relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, where he kidnapped a 25-year-old woman and beat her nearly to death. This time, a witness interrupted the crime and Smith left a living victim. He was quickly arrested, and on April 12, 1959, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for assault.
After nearly 10 years in custody, Smith was paroled in May 1968 and he moved back to the

Terry Blair (born September 16, 1961) is an American serial killer, who raped and killed at least seven women in Kansas City, Missouri.
Terry Blair was born into a family which would have many encounters with the criminal justice system. He was the fourth eldest of 10 siblings, born to a mother who had only finished the 9th grade and suffered from mental illness.
While in jail for a separate incident, brother Walter Blair Jr met a man who offered to pay him $6,000 to kill Katherine Jo Allen so she could not testify at his rape trial. Blair confessed to abducting Allen from her apartment before taking her to a vacant lot and shooting her. He was convicted of murder and was executed in 1993.
Half brother Clifford Miller was convicted in the 1992 abduction of a woman from a bar. He shot the woman in the arm and drove her to an abandoned house before raping her repeatedly and beating her until she passed out. She suffered a gunshot wound, fractured skull, broken jaw and broken cheek bones. She spent two months in the hospital, recovering. Clifford Miller was sentenced to two life sentences plus 240 years for charges including kidnapping and forcible sodomy.
Mother Janice Blair fatally

The Phantom Killer is an unidentified serial killer thought to be responsible for a series of slayings between February 22 and May 3, 1946. which became known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, which inspired the 1976 movie The Town That Dreaded Sundown. The murders occurred in and around the city of Texarkana, which sits astride the border between Texas and Arkansas. As such, there is both a city of Texarkana, TX and a city of Texarkana, AR. Most of the murders occurred in rural areas near both sides of the Texarkana area and also in rural areas of Bowie County, TX and Miller County, AR. He is Texarkana's only known serial killer and is credited with a number of attacks. The attacks took place at approximately three-week intervals. The Phantom Killer was also known as The Texarkana Phantom or simply The Phantom, The Phantom Slayer and The Moonlight Murderer because he often killed late at night. Despite the name and rumors, he did not attack when the moon was full. The Phantom Killer was never identified by law enforcement and was consequently never apprehended, similar to the more well known serial killers Jack the Ripper, who operated in the Whitechapel area of London, England

Genene Anne Jones (born July 13, 1950) is a former pediatric nurse who killed somewhere between 11 and 46 infants and children in her care. She used injections of digoxin, heparin and later succinylcholine to induce medical crises in her patients, with the intention of reviving them afterward in order to receive praise and attention. These medications are known to cause heart paralysis and other complications when given as an overdose. Many children however, did not survive the initial attack and could not be revived. The exact number of murders remain unknown, as hospital officials allegedly first misplaced then destroyed records of her activities to prevent further litigation after Jones' first conviction.
While working at the Bexar County Hospital (now The University Hospital of San Antonio) in the Pediatric Intensive care unit, it was determined that a statistically inordinate number of children Jones worked with were dying. Rather than pursue further investigation the hospital simply asked Jones to resign, which she did.
She then took a position at a pediatric physician's clinic in Kerrville, Texas, near San Antonio. It was here that she was charged with poisoning six

Rhonda Bell Thomley Martin (1907 – October 11, 1957) was an American serial killer.
A 49-year-old waitress in Montgomery, Alabama, she confessed in March 1956 to poisoning her mother, two husbands, and three of her children. She denied killing two other children.
Her fifth husband, formerly her son-in-law, was poisoned like the others but survived only to be left a paraplegic. It was his illness that led authorities to look into the strange deaths surrounding Martin.
Prosecutors said collecting insurance proceeds prompted her serial killing spree, although this is unlikely, since she only collected enough to cover burial costs, and she never admitted this was the case.
She was convicted of murdering 51-year-old Claude Carroll Martin in 1951 by surreptitiously feeding him rat poison and was executed in Alabama's electric chair on October 11, 1957.

Thug Behram (ca 1765–1840) of the Thuggee cult in India, was one of the world's most prolific killers. He may have murdered up to 931 victims by strangulation between 1790–1840 with the ceremonial cloth (or rumal, which in Hindi means handkerchief), used by his cult. Behram was executed in 1840 by hanging.
While Behram is sometimes credited with 931 murders, James Paton, an East India Company officer working for the Thuggee and Dacoity Office in the 1830s who wrote a manuscript on Thuggee, quotes Behram as saying he had "been present" at 931 cases of murder, and "I may have strangled with my own hands about 125 men, and I may have seen strangled 150 more."
The English word 'Thug' is in fact borrowed from the word 'Thuggee', although the use of the word today differs from the true reality of the 'Thuggee'. The 'Thuggee' were covert and operated as a member of a group, and the term typically referred to the killing of a large number of people in a single operation. This distinguished the term from simple armed robbery as they would target groups of travellers and kill them in one go, before taking their possessions.
Behram used his cummerbund as a rumal to execute his killings, with

Allan Legere (born February 13, 1948) is a Canadian serial killer and arsonist, also known as the Monster of the Miramichi. On May 3, 1989, Legere escaped from Prison Guard custody while serving a life sentence at the Atlantic Institution for the murder of shopkeeper John Glendenning, of Black River Bridge, New Brunswick, on the evening of June 21, 1986. Legere had been transported from Renous to the Georges L. Dumont Hospital in Moncton for the treatment of an ear infection when he escaped. Legere managed to convince officers to let him use the washroom at the hospital alone, and there he picked the lock on his handcuffs with a homemade key he had hidden in a cigar. He then used a piece of T.V. antenna that he had concealed on his body as a weapon, and held the officers at bay before fleeing. After his escape, Legere committed four additional murders, killing Annie Flam, sisters Linda and Donna Daughney, and Father James Smith. He was recaptured on November 24, 1989; rewards of $50,000 were collected for the information that led to his arrest.
Legere's trial featured the first Canadian uses of DNA fingerprinting, and Legere was convicted of murder for a second time in 1991.
As of

Anna Margaretha Zwanziger (7 August 1760 – 17 September 1811) was a Bavarian serial killer. She used arsenic, which she referred to as "her truest friend".
From 1801 until 1811, Zwanziger was employed as a housekeeper at the home of several judges in Bavaria. She would poison her employers with arsenic, and then nurse them back to health to gain their favour. She poisoned three people, and attempted to poison several others She killed four people, one of whom was a baby. Four others survived.
Zwanziger was judged guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Before she was beheaded, she said it was probably a good thing she was to be executed, as she did not think she would be able to stop.

Daniel Gonzalez (1980 – 9 August 2007), also known as the Freddy Krueger Killer and the Mummy's Boy Killer, was a spree killer who killed four people and injured two others during three days across London and Sussex in September 2004. His mother had previously written a letter to her MP criticising the fact that a serious incident had to occur before he could receive mental help. In her letter, she rhetorically asked "...does my son have to commit murder to get help?". Reporters have tried to say that he feigned mental illness long before the murders. He did in fact suffer for many years.
Gonzalez was inspired by horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th to become a "famous serial killer". He went on a drug-fueled stabbing spree, attacking the elderly and infirm, writing about his experiences in letters to himself as Zippy, his past nickname. His letters said how much he enjoyed the murders "...one of the best things I've done in my life", and how similar he was to Freddy Krueger.
On September 15, 2004, Daniel Francis Gonzalez told 61-year-old Peter King, who was walking his dog with his wife in Hilsea, Portsmouth, that he was going to kill him. He was

Dorothea Helen Puente (January 9, 1929 – March 27, 2011) was a convicted American serial killer. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and cashed the Social Security checks of her elderly and mentally disabled boarders. Those who complained were killed and buried in her yard.
She was born on January 9, 1929 as Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California to Trudy Mae Yates and Jesse James Gray. Her parents worked as cotton pickers. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight years old, in 1937. Her mother died in a motorcycle accident in 1938. She was sent to an orphanage until relatives from Fresno, California, took her in. In later life, she lied about her childhood, saying that she was one of three children who all were born and raised in Mexico.
In 1945, she was married for the first time, at the age of 16, to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific Theater. Dorothea had two daughters between 1946 and 1948, but she sent one to relatives in Sacramento, and gave the other up for adoption.
Dorothea became pregnant again in 1948, but suffered a miscarriage. In late 1948, McFaul left her. Humiliated at being abandoned,

Franz Fuchs (12 December 1949 in Gralla, Styria - 26 February 2000 in Graz) was a xenophobic Austrian terrorist. Between 1993 and 1997 he killed four people and injured 15, some of them seriously, using three improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and five waves of 25 mailbombs in total.
Fuchs' mailbomb campaigns and his personality features are according to criminal psychologists, who later characterized him, as a highly intelligent but socially inept loner. His designated targets were people he either considered to be foreigners, or organisations and individuals "friendly to foreigners."
In December 1993 he started his first wave of mailbombs. Early victims were the priest August Janisch (because of his help for refugees), Silvana Meixner (ORF journalist for minorities), and the Mayor of Vienna, Helmut Zilk, who lost a large part of his left hand in the explosion. Other mailbombs which were discovered and neutralized were targeted at Helmut Schüller (humanitarian organisation Caritas), the Green politicians Madeleine Petrovic and Terezija Stoisits, Wolfgang Gombocz and Minister Johanna Dohnal.
While attempting to disarm an improvised explosive device found at a bilingual school in

Graham Frederick Young (10 September 1947 – 1 August 1990) was an English serial killer who used poison to kill his victims. He was sent to Broadmoor in 1962 after poisoning several members of his family; killing his stepmother. After his release in 1971 he went on to poison 70 more people, two of whom died. Young, who was known as the 'teacup poisoner' was sent to Parkhurst Prison where he died of natural causes in 1990.
Young was born in Neasden, north west London. He was fascinated from a young age by poisons and their effects. In 1961 at 14 he started to test poisons on his family, enough to make them violently ill. He amassed large quantities of antimony and digitalis by repeatedly buying small amounts, lying about his age and claiming they were for science experiments at school.
In 1962 Young's stepmother, Molly, died from poisoning. He had been poisoning his father, sister, and a school friend. Young's aunt Winnie, who knew of his fascination with chemistry and poisons, became suspicious. He sometimes suffered the same nausea and sicknesses as his family, forgetting which foods he had laced. He was sent to a psychiatrist, who recommended contacting the police. Young was

Waneta Ethel (Nixon) Hoyt (May 13, 1946 – August 13, 1998) was an American serial killer.
Hoyt was born in Richford, New York and died at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.
She dropped out of Newark Valley High School in the 10th grade to marry Tim Hoyt on January 11, 1964.
Their son Eric died on January 26, 1965, only 101 days after he was born on October 17, 1964. None of the couple's other children — James (May 31, 1966 – September 26, 1968), Julie (July 19 – September 5, 1968), Molly (March 18 – June 5, 1970), and Noah (May 9 – July 28, 1971) — lived past 28 months. For over 20 years, it was believed that the babies had died of sudden infant death syndrome. Several years after the death of their last child, Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt adopted a child, Jay, who remained healthy through childhood and was 17 years old when Mrs. Hoyt was arrested in 1994.
The last two biological Hoyt children, Molly and Noah, were subjects of pediatric research conducted by Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, who published an article in 1972 in the Journal Pediatrics proposing a connection between sleep apnea and SIDS. The article was controversial.
In 1985 a prosecutor in a neighboring county who had

Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) is an American serial killer who committed most of the Atlanta Child Murders that occurred in 1979 through 1981. On February 26,1982, Williams was found guilty of the murder of two adult men. After his conviction, the Atlanta, Georgia police declared that an additional 23 of the 29 child murders were solved, with Williams shown to be the murderer.
Williams was born and raised in Atlanta's Dixie Hills neighborhood of Northwest Atlanta to Homer and Faye Williams. Both parents were teachers. Williams graduated from Douglass High school and developed a keen interest in radio and journalism. Eventually he constructed his own carrier-current radio station. He also began hanging out at radio stations WIGO and WAOK radio and befriended a number of the announcing crew and began dabbling in becoming a music producer and manager.
He first became a suspect May 1981 when his car was on the bridge from where the sound of a loud splash was heard in the river by a stake out team investigating the child murder case. He was stopped by police and questioned and claimed that he was going out of town to audition a young singer, Cheryl Johnson. The police

Yang Xinhai (Chinese: 杨新海) (July 29, 1968 – February 14, 2004), also known as Wang Ganggang, Yang Zhiya, and Yang Liu, was a Chinese serial killer who confessed to committing 65 murders and 23 rapes between 1999 and 2003, and was sentenced to death and executed for 67. He was dubbed the "Monster Killer" by the media. He is the most prolific serial killer China has seen.
Yang was born on July 29, 1968 in Zhengyang County, Zhumadian, Henan Province, China. His family was one of the poorest in their village. The youngest of four children, Yang was clever but introverted. He dropped out of school in 1985, at age 17, and refused to return home, instead traveling around China and working as a hired laborer.
In 1988 and 1991, Yang was sentenced to labor camps for theft in Xi'an, Shaanxi and Shijiazhuang, Hebei. In 1996, he was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted rape in Zhumadian, Henan and released in 1999.
Yang's killings took place between 1999 and 2003 in the provinces of Anhui, Hebei, Henan and Shandong. At night, he would enter his victims' homes, and kill all of the occupants—mainly farmers—with axes, hammers and shovels, sometimes killing entire families. Each time he

Scott Thomas Erskine (born December 22, 1962) is an American serial killer on California's death row, convicted for the murder of two California boys in 1993. He is currently incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison.
Erskine grew up in southern California. When he was five years old, Erskine darted into traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach and was hit by a station wagon. He remained in a coma for 60 hours. Although physically he appeared recovered, he frequently complained to his mother about headaches, and he experienced "black out" moments where he couldn't remember what he was last doing. At the age of 10, he started molesting his 6-year-old sister, forcing her to perform oral sex upon him. He soon began abusing her friends, threatening to kill them if they told anybody. Erskine attended Southwest Junior High School in San Diego, California and was placed in "special classes" for the emotionally disturbed. At 15, Erskine escaped from a juvenile detention facility, pulled a knife on a 13-year-old girl and raped her. The next morning, he assaulted a 27-year-old female jogger with a knife.
In 1980, while on his way to interview for a camp counselor's position, Erskine

Daniel Camargo Barbosa was a psychopathic serial killer from Colombia, South America. It is believed that he raped and killed over 150 young girls in Colombia and Ecuador during the 1970s and 1980s.
Camargo's mother died when he was a little boy and his father was overbearing and emotionally distant. He was raised by an abusive stepmother, who punished him and sometimes dressed him in girls' clothing, making him a victim of ridicule in front of his peers.
He was first arrested in Bogotá on May 24, 1958 for petty theft.
Camargo had a de facto union with a woman named Alcira and had two children with her. He fell in love with another woman, Esperanza (age 28), whom he planned to marry, but then found out that she was not a virgin. This became the root of Camargo's fixations. He and Esperanza formed an agreement that he would stay with her if she aided him in finding other virgin girls to have sex with. This began a period of their partnership in crime. Esperanza was Camargo's accomplice, luring young girls to an apartment under false pretenses and then drugging them with sodium seconal sleeping pills so that Camargo could rape them. Camargo committed five rapes in this way, but did

Daniel Harold Rolling (May 26, 1954 – October 25, 2006), also known as The Gainesville Ripper, was an American serial killer who murdered five students in Gainesville, Florida. Rolling later confessed to raping several of his victims, committing an additional 1989 triple homicide in Shreveport, Louisiana, and attempting to murder his father in May 1990. In total, Rolling confessed to killing eight people. He was executed by lethal injection in 2006.
Rolling was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had a difficult upbringing. His father, James Rolling, was a Shreveport Police officer who abused him, his mother, Claudia, and later his brother, Kevin. In one incident, Danny's mother went to the hospital after she claimed that her husband, James Rolling, tried to make her cut herself with a razor blade. His mother made repeated attempts to leave her husband but always returned. In another example of James Rolling's cruel sense of discipline, he pinned Danny to the ground and cuffed him, then had police come to take him away like a criminal because his father was embarrassed by Danny. The idea that Danny was an unwanted child was reinforced ever since birth by his father.
As a teenager and

George Chapman (December 14, 1865 – April 7, 1903) was a Polish serial killer known as the Borough Poisoner. Born Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski in Poland, he moved as an adult to England, where he committed his crimes. He was convicted and executed after poisoning three women, but is remembered today mostly because some authorities suspected him of being the notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper.
Chapman was born in the village of Nagórna, near Koło, Poland. According to a certificate found in his personal effects after his arrest, he was apprenticed at age 14 to a provincial feldsher (a sort of nurse-practitioner) in Zwoleń, whom he assisted in procedures such as the application of leeches for blood-letting. He then enrolled on a course in practical surgery at the Warsaw Praga hospital. This course was very brief, lasting from October 1885 to January 1886 (attested to by another certificate in his possession) but he continued to serve as a male nurse, or doctor's assistant in Warsaw until December 1886. He later left Poland, although the year in which he came to England has not been ascertained. Witness testimony at his trial seems to indicate that he arrived in London between

John Edward Robinson (born December 27, 1943) is a convicted serial killer, con man, embezzler, kidnapper, and forger who was found guilty in 2003 of three murders and received the death sentence for two of them. He subsequently admitted responsibility for five additional homicides, and investigators fear that there might be other, undiscovered victims as well.
Because he made contact with most of his post-1993 victims via on-line chat rooms, he is sometimes referred to as "the Internet's first serial killer".
Robinson was born in Cicero, Illinois, the third of five children of an alcoholic father and a disciplinarian mother. In 1957 he became an Eagle Scout, and reportedly traveled to London with a group of Scouts who performed before Queen Elizabeth II. Later that year he enrolled at Quigley Preparatory Seminary, in Chicago, a private boys' school for aspiring priests, but dropped out after one year due to disciplinary issues.
In 1961 he enrolled at Morton Junior College in Cicero to become a medical X-ray technician, but dropped out after 2 years. In 1964 he moved to Kansas City and married Nancy Jo Lynch, who bore their first child, John Jr., in 1965, and fraternal twins

Marc Vincent Sappington (born February 9, 1978) is an American spree killer convicted of murdering four acquaintances in March and April 2001 in Kansas City, Kansas. He gained notoriety for eating part of the leg of one of his victims, Alton "Fred" Brown.
Lawyers for Sappington blamed the four-day killing spree on a history of schizophrenia and daily use of the hallucinogenic drug PCP. Sappington himself claimed that voices in his head told him to eat flesh and blood or he would die.
Sappington was convicted on June 23, 2004 of murdering Terry T. Green, 25, Michael Weaver Jr., 22, and Alton "Fred" Brown Jr., 16 in April 2001. Sappington was convicted on December 10, 2004 of an attempted aggravated robbery and murder of David Mashak at his auto dealership in March 2001. Sappington's conviction was affirmed by the Kansas Supreme Court on November 2, 2007.
In an April 2001 videotape, Sappington had confessed to stabbing Weaver to death, leaving Green's body in a car, and shooting Brown, before dismembering his body and eating a small piece of his leg.
Sappington is currently incarerated at El Dorado Correctional Facility; where he is serving four consecutive life sentences.

Robert Lee Yates, Jr. (born May 27, 1952) is an American serial killer from Spokane, Washington. From 1996 to 1998, Yates is known to have murdered at least 13 women, all of whom were prostitutes working on Spokane's "Skid Row" on E. Sprague Avenue. Yates also confessed to two murders committed in Walla Walla in 1975 and a 1988 murder committed in Skagit County. In 2002, Yates was convicted of killing two women in Pierce County. He currently is on death row at the Washington State Penitentiary.
Yates grew up in Oak Harbor, Washington in a middle-class family that attended a local Seventh-day Adventist church. He graduated from Oak Harbor High School in 1970, and in 1975, he was hired by the Washington State Department of Corrections to work as a prison guard at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. After working there for six months, Yates enlisted in the United States Army, in which he became certified to fly civilian transport airplanes and helicopters. Yates was stationed in various countries outside the continental United States, including Germany and later Somalia during the United Nations peacekeeping mission of the early 1990s. He earned several military awards

Anatoly Yuriyovych Onoprienko (born Ukrainian: Анатолій Юрійович Онопрієнко on July 25, 1959) is a Ukrainian serial killer. He is also known by the nicknames "The Beast of Ukraine", "The Terminator" and "Citizen O". After police arrested the 37-year-old former forestry student on April 16, 1996, Onoprienko confessed to killing 52 people.
Anatoly Onoprienko was the younger of two sons; his brother, Valentin, was 13 years older. His father, Yuri Onoprienko, was decorated for bravery during the Second World War. When Anatoly was 4 years old, his mother died. He was cared for by his grandparents and aunt for a time before being handed over to an orphanage in the village of Privitnoe. In one interview, Onoprienko later alleged that it was this which predetermined his destiny, and remarked that 70% of those who are brought up in orphanages later end up in prison when adults.
When finally arrested by police, Onoprienko was found to be in possession of a hunting rifle and a number of other weapons, which matched the murder weapons used in several of the killings, together with a number of items which had been removed from murder victims. While in custody he eventually confessed to eight

Christie Cleek (or -Cleek or of-the-Cleek), is a legendary Scottish cannibal, somewhat in the vein of the better-known Sawney Bean. According to folklore, his real name was Andrew Christie, a Perth butcher. During a severe famine in the mid-fourteenth century (Hector Boece records floods, morrain and plagues of 'myce and ratonis' throughout Scotland in 1340), Christie joined a group of scavengers in the foothills of the Grampians. When one of the party died of starvation, Christie put his skills to work on the corpse, and provided his companions with a ready meal. The group obviously developed a taste for human flesh as, under Christie's leadership, they began to ambush travellers on the passes of the Grampians, feeding on their bodies and those of their horses. It is alleged that before attacking, Christie would haul his victims from their mounts with a hook on a rod: this implement was the 'cleke' (i.e., 'crook') from which he took his sobriquet. Thirty riders apparently died at Christie's hands. Eventually the company were defeated by an armed force from Perth, except for Christie himself, who supposedly escaped and re-entered society under a new name. The earliest versions of

Dean Arnold Corll (December 24, 1939 – August 8, 1973) was an American serial killer, also known as the "Candy Man" and the "Pied Piper" who, together with two youthful accomplices named David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, abducted, raped, tortured and murdered a minimum of 28 boys in a series of killings spanning from 1970 to 1973 in Houston, Texas. The crimes, which became known as the Houston Mass Murders, came to light only after Henley fatally shot Corll.
Corll was known as both the Candy Man and the Pied Piper because he and his family had owned and operated a candy factory in the Heights and he had been known to give free candy to local children.
At the time of their discovery, the Houston Mass Murders were considered the worst example of serial murder in American history.
Dean Arnold Corll was born on December 24, 1939 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the first child of Mary Robinson and Arnold Edwin Corll. Corll's father was strict with his son, whereas his mother was extremely protective of Dean. The marriage of Corll's parents was marred by frequent quarrelling and the couple divorced in 1946, four years after the birth of their younger son, Stanley. Mary Corll subsequently sold

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994) was an American serial killer and sex offender. Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with the majority of the murders occurring between 1987 and 1991. His murders involved rape, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism. On November 28, 1994, he was beaten to death by an inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution, where he had been incarcerated.
Dahmer was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, the son of Joyce Annette (née Flint) and Lionel Herbert Dahmer, an analytical chemist. Seven years later, his brother David was born. Joyce Dahmer reportedly had a difficult pregnancy with her elder son. When Jeffrey was eight years old, he moved with his family to Bath, Ohio. Dahmer grew increasingly withdrawn and uncommunicative between the ages of 10 and 15, showing little interest in any hobbies or social interactions. He biked around his neighborhood looking for dead animals, which he dissected at home (or in the woods near his home). In one instance, he put a dog's head on a stake. Though fundamentally an outcast at Revere High School, Dahmer nonetheless became something of a cult figure among some students due to

John George Haigh (24 July 1909 – 10 August 1949), commonly known as the "Acid Bath Murderer", was an English serial killer during the 1940s. He was convicted of the murders of six people, although he claimed to have killed nine. He did not use acid actually to kill his victims, but rather as (he believed) a foolproof method of body disposal – dissolving their bodies in concentrated sulphuric acid before forging papers in order to sell their possessions and collect substantial sums of money. During the investigation, it became apparent that Haigh was using the acid to destroy victims' bodies because he misunderstood the term corpus delicti, thinking that if victims' bodies could not be found, then a murder conviction would not be possible. The substantial forensic evidence, notwithstanding the absence of his victims' bodies, was sufficient for him to be convicted for the murders and subsequently executed.
John George Haigh was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, and grew up in the village of Outwood, West Yorkshire. His parents, John Robert, an engineer, and Emily, née Hudson, were members of the Plymouth Brethren, a conservative Protestant sect who advocated austere lifestyles. He was

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, aka "La Bestia" ("The Beast") or "Tribilín" (American Spanish translation of Disney's "Goofy") (born 25 January 1957 in Génova, Quindío, Colombia) is a Colombian rapist and serial killer. In 1999, he admitted to the rape and murder of 147 young boys. The number of his victims, based on the locations of skeletons listed on maps that Garavito drew in prison, could eventually exceed 300. He has been described by local media as "the world's worst serial killer" because of the high number of victims.
Once captured, Garavito was subject to the maximum penalty available in Colombia, which was 30 years. However, as he confessed the crimes and helped authorities locate bodies, Colombian law allowed him to apply for special benefits, including a reduction of his sentence to 22 years and possibly an even earlier release for further cooperation and good behavior. Colombian law has since increased the maximum penalty to 60 years in prison.
In subsequent years, Colombians have increasingly felt that due to Garavito's approaching early release, his sentence is not sufficient punishment for his crimes. Colombian law originally had no way to extend the sentence,

Thomas Jeffries (Jefferies) was a bushranger, serial killer and cannibal in the early 19th century in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania, Australia). Jeffries was transported for life from Scotland on the Albion, arriving in Van Diemen's Land on 21 October 1823. He was sentenced to 12 months in Macquarie Harbour, the penal settlement on the colony's west coast in June 1824 for threatening to stab Constable Lawson. By August 1825 he had been appointed a watch house keeper and flagellator (flogger) at Launceston Gaol, which would have suited his sadistic personality.
Jeffries was a violent sexual offender, and on 25 August 1825 was fined half of his salary for falsely imprisoning and assaulting Mrs Jessop. In October he was fined 20 shillings for taking a female prisoner out of the watch house. On 31 December 1825, Brady and three convicts, Perry, Russell and Hopkins, escaped from the Launceston Watch House. They robbed the hut of a Mr Barnard, then broke into the house of a settler called Tibbs, about five miles from Launceston. Tibbs's wife and five-month-old child and a neighbour called Basham were at the house. When they tried to tie the men up, they resisted. Basham was shot and

William George Bonin (January 8, 1947 – February 23, 1996) was an American serial killer and twice-paroled sex offender, also known as the Freeway Killer who committed the rape, torture and murder of a minimum of 21 boys and young men in a series of killings spanning between 1979 and 1980 in southern California. Bonin is also suspected of committing a further fifteen murders. He was convicted of 14 of these murders and subsequently executed in 1996.
Bonin became known as the Freeway Killer due to the fact the majority of his victims' bodies were discovered alongside various southern California freeways.
Bonin was born in Connecticut in January, 1947, the second of three brothers. His father was a compulsive gambler and alcoholic, who beat his wife and sons. Bonin's mother, Alice, was also an alcoholic, who frequently left Bonin and his brothers in the care of their grandfather, a convicted child molester. Bonin and his brothers were neglected as children, and were often fed by neighbors.
In 1953, aged 6, Bonin was placed in an orphanage, where he remained until the age of 9.
At the age of 10, Bonin was arrested for stealing license plates and ended up in a juvenile detention center

The Claremont serial murders is the case of the unsolved murders of two young Australian women and the unresolved disappearance of a third in 1996 and 1997 in Claremont, a wealthy western suburb of Perth, Western Australia. All three women disappeared in similar circumstances after attending night spots in Claremont, leading police to suspect that an unidentified serial killer was the offender. Mark Dixie was a suspect in the killings however a WA Police Deputy Commissioner Murray Lampard has been quoted in saying (The Age February 24, 2008) "Dixie was closely investigated at the time and eventually ruled out as a suspect."
The case began with the disappearance of Sarah Spiers, 18, on 26 January 1996, after she left a nightclub in the centre of Claremont. Her disappearance was described by her friends and family as out of character and attracted massive publicity. Spiers had apparently called a taxi from a phone booth but was not present when the responding vehicle arrived. Her fate remains uncertain.
Some months later, on 9 June 1996, Jane Rimmer, 23, disappeared from the same part of Claremont. Her body was found in bushland near Woolcoot Road, Wellard, in August 1996.
On 14

David Richard Berkowitz (born Richard David Falco; June 1, 1953), also known as Son of Sam and the .44 Caliber Killer, is an American serial killer convicted of a series of murders that began in July, 1976. Perpetrated with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver, the killings continued for over a year, leaving six victims dead and several others wounded. The highly publicized shootings terrorized New York City and achieved worldwide notoriety.
After his arrest by New York police in August, 1977, Berkowitz was indicted for eight separate shooting incidents. Berkowitz confessed to all of them and claimed that he was commanded to kill by a demon that possessed his neighbor's dog. He subsequently confessed to multiple acts of arson in the city, all previously unidentified with him.
Berkowitz has been imprisoned since his arrest and is serving six life sentences consecutively. In the mid-1990s, he amended his confession to claim that he had been a member of a violent Satanic cult that orchestrated the incidents as ritual murder. Though he remains the only person ever charged with the shootings, some law enforcement authorities have argued that Berkowitz's claims are credible. A new

John Allen Muhammad (December 31, 1960 - November 10, 2009) was a convicted murderer from the United States. He, along with his seventeen-year-old partner, Lee Boyd Malvo, carried out the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, killing at least 10 people. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested in connection with the attacks on October 24, 2002, following tips from alert citizens. Although the pairing's actions were classified as psychopathy attributable to serial killer characteristics by the media, whether or not their psychopathy meets this classification or that of a spree killer is debated by researchers.
Born as John Allen Williams, Muhammad joined the Nation of Islam in 1987 and later changed his surname to Muhammad. At Muhammad's trial, the prosecutor claimed that the rampage was part of a plot to kill his ex-wife and regain custody of his children, but the judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to support this argument.
His trial for one of the murders (the murder of Dean Harold Meyers in Prince William County, Virginia) began in October 2003, and the following month he was found guilty of capital murder. Four months later he was sentenced to death. While awaiting execution in

The Original Night Stalker is the name given to an unidentified serial killer and rapist who murdered at least ten people in Southern California from 1979 through 1986. The crimes initially centered on east Sacramento where at least fifty women were sexually assaulted between June 1976 to July 1979. The perpetrator was dubbed the The East Area Rapist. In 2001 the Northern California rapes were linked by DNA to murders in Southern California.
The Original Night Stalker/The East Area Rapist was never apprehended, several suspects have been cleared through DNA, alibi or other investigative means and methods.
California law enforcement authorities estimate 50 rapes in Sacramento County, Contra Costa County, were committed by the Original Night Stalker. DNA evidence links him to 10 murders in Goleta, Ventura, Dana Point, and Irvine, California. Investigators suspect at least 2 other murders were committed by the Original Night Stalker.
The Sacramento East Area Rapist is believed to have began as a burglar, only later committing rapes. His modus operandi was to stalk middle class neighborhoods at night for women who lived in single story homes. He ran away when spotted prowling, though

Robert Shulman (March 28, 1954 – April 13, 2006) was an American serial killer. Shulman, a postal worker from Hicksville, New York on Long Island, was convicted of murdering five prostitutes between 1991 and 1996, the year when he was arrested.
Shulman was ultimately convicted of five murders.
Looking for the murder site, a detective canvassing hotels heard about a man driving a blue Cadillac who cruised the area. Trying to track the man down with this information, women were located who led them, not to a hotel, but to a residence where a blue Cadillac was seen. The registration was obtained, and the car was registered to Shulman's brother. Trying to get information about the sleeping bag in which Bunting was found, detectives learned Sears was the only manufacturer. Sears was contacted to see if the brother had purchased one with a credit card. Sears said the brother had no card, but pointed out that Shulman had a card. This was how police were initially pointed towards Shulman as a possible culprit. Women later identified him as the man cruising in the Cadillac, and cadaver dogs signaled the possibility of dead remains having been present in the Cadillac. Police searched

Stephen Joseph "The Rifleman" Flemmi (born June 9, 1934) is an Italian-American mobster and close associate of Winter Hill Gang boss James J. Bulger. Beginning in 1965, Flemmi was a top echelon informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Despite delivering a great deal of intelligence about the inner workings of the Patriarca crime family, Flemmi's own criminal activities proved a public relations nightmare for the FBI. For this reason, he was prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and sentenced to a long term of incarceration.
Flemmi is a decorated veteran of the Korean War.
Stephen Joseph Flemmi was the eldest of three sons born to Italian immigrant Giovanni and Mary Irene Flemmi. He was raised in the Orchard Park tenement located at 25 Ambrose Street in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His father was a bricklayer and veteran of the Royal Italian Army during World War I, and his mother was a full-time homemaker.
Flemmi is described by his former mistress Marilyn DeSilva as mild mannered and personable. He was a childhood friend and mentor of Richard J. Schneiderhan, who later became a lieutenant in the Massachusetts State Police.
Flemmi

Bruno Lüdke (3 April 1908 – 26 April 1944) was an alleged German serial killer. Nazi police officials connected him to at least 51 murder victims, mainly women, killed in a 15-year period, which began in 1928 and ended with his arrest in 1943.
Born in Köpenick, Lüdke had a mild intellectual disability (he could not, for example, tell interrogators how many minutes there were in an hour) and worked as a coachman. He was well known by the local police as a petty thief and peeping tom. On 31 January 1943 a woman was found murdered in the woods near Köpenick, strangled with her own shawl. The victim showed signs of post-mortem sexual abuse and her purse was missing. Police brought in Lüdke for questioning on 18 March 1943, where he quickly confessed to murdering not only the woman but also several other victims, and was taken into custody. Witnesses report Lüdke showed signs of physical abuse and he stated that 'they would kill me if I didn't confess'.
Lüdke was never put on trial for any of the killings. Declared insane, he was sent to the SS-run 'Institute of Criminological Medicine' in Vienna, where medical experiments were carried out on him until his death by lethal injection in

Eric Edgar Cooke nicknamed The Night Caller (25 February 1931 – 26 October 1964) was an Australian serial killer. From 1959 to 1963, he terrorised the city of Perth, Western Australia, by committing 22 violent crimes, eight of which resulted in deaths.
Eric Cooke was born on 25 February 1931 in Victoria Park, a suburb of Perth, and was the eldest of three children.
Cooke was born into an unhappy, violent family; his parents married solely because his mother was pregnant with him, and his alcoholic father beat him frequently, especially when the boy tried to protect his mother from the elder Cooke's drunken rages. Cooke was frequently hospitalized for head injuries and had suspected brain damage. He also suffered from recurrent headaches and was once admitted to an asylum.
Cooke was born with a hare lip and a cleft palate, for which he had one operation when he was three months old and another when he was 3½. Surgical operations to repair the deformities were not totally successful, and left him with a slight facial deformity, and he spoke in a mumble; these handicaps made him the target of bullying at school. He left school at 14 to work in order to support the family. As a

Fritz Honka (1935 – 19 October 1998) was a German serial killer. Between 1970 and 1975, he killed at least four prostitutes from Hamburg's red light district, keeping the bodies in his flat.
At 5 ft 5 in (1.65 m), Fritz Honka was extremely sensitive about his height. He liked his women shorter, and he also liked them toothless, to alleviate his fears of mutilation during oral sex. He found relief with aging prostitutes from Hamburg's red light district, killing at least four of them in his small attic room in the Zeißstraße 74 of Ottensen, Hamburg. Disposal was a problem, given Honka's size and basic laziness. He kept the bodies in his flat, and fortified himself with alcohol against the stench. When neighbours griped about unpleasant smells, he doused the place with quarts of cheap deodorant.
On 15 July 1975, the mummified remains were found by firemen after a fire in the house. Honka was not present, being on shift as a night watchman. He was arrested when he returned home. In custody, Honka said he killed the women after they mocked his preference for oral sex over "straight" intercourse. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, the maximum possible under German law.
Honka was

Lee Boyd Malvo (also known as John Lee Malvo), born February 18, 1985, is a convicted murderer who, along with John Allen Muhammad, committed murders in connection with the Beltway sniper attacks in the Washington Metropolitan Area over a three-week period in October 2002. Although the pairing's actions were classified as psychopathy attributable to serial killer characteristics by the media, whether or not their psychopathy meets this classification or that of a spree killer is debated by researchers.
According to Malvo's confession, he and Muhammad had planned to kill six white people a day for a month in order "to terrorize the nation." The beltway attacks turned out to be only the latest of a series of shootings across the United States connected to these individuals which began on the West Coast. Muhammad had befriended the juvenile Malvo, and had enlisted him in the murderous rampage. According to Craig Cooley, one of Malvo's defense attorneys, Malvo believed Muhammad when he told him that the $10 million ransom sought from the US government to stop the sniper killings would be used to establish a Utopian society for 140 black homeless children on a Canadian compound.
Lee

Ondrej Rigo (born 1955) is a Slovak serial killer and necrophile who targeted women in Bratislava, Munich and Amsterdam from 1990 to 1992. Currently serving a life sentence for 9 murders and 1 attempted murder in Leopoldov Prison in Slovakia, Rigo is a dissocial and schizoid psychopath while also being a necrophile, finding pleasure in having intercourse with women with mutilated heads. Ondrej Rigo remains the Slovak murderer with the highest number of victims and he is also the most prolific serial killer in modern Slovak history. He is eligible to apply for parole in 2019.
Ondrej Rigo has a brother, who is angry with him because of the troubles he got him into in Germany and a daughter who sometimes visits him in prison. According to an article in Slovak newspaper SME Rigo is of Roma ethnicity. Even as an adult, Rigo was a short man. When he was 14 he was taken into a youth corrective institution and later into an orphanage together with his siblings. They stayed there for a year, having been taken from their mother after their father's arrest. Rigo's mother died in 2000 after being hit by a car. Learning of her death is the one time he remembers crying in his life. His father

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer née Hobley (1838 – 10 June 1896) was the most prolific baby farm murderer of Victorian England. She was tried and hanged for one murder, but there is little doubt she was responsible for many more similar deaths—possibly 400 or more—over a period of perhaps twenty years.
Unlike many of her generation, Amelia Dyer was not the product of grinding poverty. She was born the youngest of 5 (with 3 brothers, Thomas, James and William, and a sister, Ann) in the small village of Pyle Marsh, just east of Bristol (now part of Bristol's urban sprawl known as Pile Marsh), the daughter of a master shoemaker, Samuel Hobley, and Sarah Hobley née Weymouth. She learned to read and write and developed a love of literature and poetry. However, her somewhat privileged childhood was marred by the mental illness of her mother, caused by typhus. Amelia witnessed her mother's violent fits and was obliged to care for her until she died raving in 1848. Researchers would later comment on the effect this had on Amelia, and also what it would teach Amelia about the signs exhibited by those who appear to lose their mind through illness.
After her mother's death Amelia lived with an aunt in

Mataviejitas (Sp. "old lady killer") is the name given by the press in Mexico to Juana Barraza Samperio, a serial killer operating within the metropolitan area of Mexico City until January 25, 2006.
The first murder attributed to Mataviejitas has been dated variously to the late 1990s and to a specific killing on 17 November 2003. The authorities and the press have given various estimates as to the total number of the killer's victims, with estimated totals ranging from 24 to 49 deaths.
All the murderer's victims were adult women aged 60 or over, most of whom lived alone. Murder was by bludgeoning or strangulation, and the killer invariably robbed the victims. In a number of cases, police said, evidence of sexual abuse was also found.
Bernardo Bátiz, the chief prosecutor in Mexico City, described Mataviejitas as having "a brilliant mind, [being] quite clever and careful", and probably struck after a period spent gaining the trust of an intended victim. Officers investigating the killer's modus operandi suspected that Mataviejitas posed as a government official offering the chance to sign up to welfare programmes.
The search for Mataviejitas was complicated by conflicting evidence.

Abdullah Shah (died April 20, 2004) was an Afghan man found guilty in Kabul of killing more than 20 people, including his wife. His sanctioned execution was the first in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.
Shah served under Zardad Khan —even earning the nickname Zardad's dog— who served under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the Civil war in Afghanistan (1992–1996). Shah and Zardad robbed travelers on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad.
Shah was first convicted in special court proceedings in October 2002. Nine people testified against him at the trial, including another wife he tried to set on fire. The bodies of many of Shah's victims were found in a well in Paghman District.
The execution in the Pul-e-Charkhi jail. Interim president Hamid Karzai signed the death warrant. At the execution, Shah was shot in the back of the head. Witnesses present included representatives of the Afghan police and the Attorney General's office, and doctors.
Amnesty International protested against the execution claiming Afghanistan avoided basic standards of fairness. Amnesty International added that Abdullah Shah was probably silenced so he could not testify against commanders allied to the

Carl Eugene Watts (November 7, 1953 – September 21, 2007), also known by his nickname Coral, was an American serial killer dubbed "The Sunday Morning Slasher". He died of prostate cancer while serving two sentences of life without parole in a Michigan prison for the murders of Helen Dutcher and Gloria Steele.
Carl Eugene Watts was born in Killeen, Texas to Richard Eugene Watts and Dorothy Mae Young. His father was a private first class in the Army, and his mother was a kindergarten art teacher. When Watts was less than two years of age, his parents separated and he was raised by his mother. Watts and his mother moved to Inkster, Michigan, and in 1962, Dorothy Mae married a mechanic named Norman Caesar with whom she had two daughters.
As a child, Watts was described as being strange. Around the age of twelve, Watts claimed that this was when he started to fantasize about torturing and killing girls and young women. During adolescence, Watts began to stalk girls and is believed to have killed his first victim before the age of 15.
When Watts was 13, he was infected with meningitis which caused him to be held back in the eighth grade. Upon his return to school, Watts had difficulty

Daisy Louisa C. De Melker (1 June 1886 - 30 December 1932), (née Hancorn-Smith) simply known as Daisy de Melker, was a trained nurse who poisoned two husbands with strychnine for their life insurance while living in Germiston in the central Transvaal (now Gauteng), and then poisoned her only son with arsenic for reasons which are still unclear. She is historically the second woman to have been hanged in South Africa.
Daisy de Melker was accused of three murders but was only convicted of one, that of killing her son. The charges of poisoning her husbands were never proved in a court of law. It was William Sproat, the younger brother of her second husband, who fingered her because he wanted Robert Sproat's will in favour of Daisy declared invalid. Daisy refused to refund an alleged loan from Mrs Jane Sproat, Robert's mother, to Robert; she regarded it as a gift and argued that it was not stipulated in the will as a loan. William Sproat won the civil case regarding the will, which ran concurrently with the murder trial, and was awarded costs. Daisy withdrew on the date Justice Greenberg sentenced her for murder. William's was a Pyrrhic victory however. To pay her exorbitant legal

Edmund Emil "Big Ed" Kemper III (born December 18, 1948), also known as "The Co-ed Killer", is an American serial killer and necrophile who was active in California in the early 1970s. He started his criminal life by murdering his grandparents when he was 15 years old. Kemper later killed and dismembered six female hitchhikers in the Santa Cruz area. He then murdered his mother and one of her friends before turning himself in to the authorities days later. Kemper is noted for his imposing physicality, standing 6 ft 9 inches (2.06 m) and weighing over 300 pounds (140 kg).
Kemper was the middle child and only son born to Edmund Emil Kemper, Jr. (1919–1985) and Clarnell E. Strandberg (1921–1973). As a child he was extremely bright, but displayed sociopathic behavior from a young age, including cruelty to animals; he purportedly fatally stabbed a pet cat at age 13. He acted out bizarre sexual rituals with his sisters' dolls and exhibited a dark fantasy life. He recalled later that his eldest sister pushed him into the deep end of a swimming pool and he had to struggle to get out and nearly drowned. She also pushed him within yards of a moving train.
Kemper had a close relationship with

Gary Michael Heidnik (November 22, 1943 – July 6, 1999) was an American murderer who kidnapped, tortured and raped six women and kept them prisoner in his Philadelphia, Pennsylvania basement.
Heidnik was born to Michael and Ellen Heidnik, and was raised in the Eastlake suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. His brother Terry was younger by one year. The Heidnik children were raised by their mother for four years before being placed in the care of Michael Heidnik and his new wife. Heidnik would later claim that he was often emotionally abused by his father. Heidnik suffered a lifelong problem of bed wetting, and his father would humiliate his son by hanging his stained sheets from Gary's bedroom window, in full view of their neighbors.
At school, Heidnik did not interract with his fellow students and refused to make eye contact. When a well-meaning new female student asked, "Did you get the homework done, Gary?", he yelled at her and told her she was not "worthy enough" to talk to him. Heidnik was also teased about his oddly shaped head,which he and Terry claimed was the result of a young Gary's falling out of a tree. Heidnik performed well academically and tested with an I.Q. of 130. With the

Gilles de Montmorency-Laval (1404–1440), Baron de Rais, was a Breton knight, a leader in the French army and a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. He is best known by his reputation and conviction as a prolific serial killer of children.
A member of the House of Montmorency-Laval, Gilles de Rais grew up under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather and increased his fortune by marriage. Following the War of the Breton Succession, he earned the favour of the Duke and was admitted to the French court. From 1427 to 1435, Gilles served as a commander in the Royal Army, and fought alongside Joan of Arc against the English and their Burgundian allies during the Hundred Years' War, for which he was appointed Marshal of France.
In 1434/1435, he retired from military life, depleted his wealth by staging an extravagant theatrical spectacle of his own composition and dabbled in the occult. After 1432 Gilles engaged in a series of child murders, his victims possibly numbering in the hundreds. The killings came to an end in 1440 when a violent dispute with a clergyman led to an ecclesiastical investigation which brought Gilles' crimes to light. At his trial the parents of missing children in the

Jack the Stripper was the nickname given to an unknown serial killer responsible for what came to be known as the London "nude murders" between 1964 and 1965 (also known as the "Hammersmith murders" or "Hammersmith nudes" case).
His victimology and nickname is similar to Jack the Ripper's. He murdered six — possibly eight —prostitutes, whose nude bodies were discovered around London or dumped in the River Thames. The victim count is ambiguous because two of the murders attributed to him did not fit his modus operandi.
Hannah Tailford: 30. Originally from a northwest mining family, Hannah Tailford was found dead on 2 February 1964 near the Hammersmith Bridge. She had been strangled and several of her teeth were missing; her underwear had also been forced down her throat.
Irene Lockwood: 26. Irene Lockwood was found dead on 8 April 1964 on the shore of the Thames, not far from where Hannah Tailford had been discovered; their two deaths, along with that of Elizabeth Figg, were linked and police realized that a killer was on the loose. 57-year-old caretaker Kenneth Archibald confessed to this murder almost three weeks later; this confession was dismissed due to inconsistencies in his

Kathleen Megan Folbigg (née Donovan) (born 14 June 1967) is an Australian child killer. Folbigg was convicted of murdering her three infant children, eight-month-old Patrick Allen, 10-month-old Sarah Kathleen and 19-month-old Laura Elizabeth. Folbigg was also convicted of the manslaughter of a fourth child, Caleb Gibson, aged 19 days. The murders took place between 1991 and 1999, coming to an end only when her husband discovered her personal diary, which detailed the killings.
Folbigg was originally sentenced to 40 years' jail, with a non-parole period of 30 years, but on appeal this was reduced to 30 years, with a non-parole period of 25 years. Folbigg maintains her innocence, claiming the four children died from natural causes.
On 8 January 1969, Folbigg's natural father, Thomas John Britton, murdered her mother, also named Kathleen, by stabbing her 24 times. Following her father's arrest on the day after the murder, Folbigg was made a ward of the state and placed into foster care with a couple.
On 18 July 1970, Folbigg was removed from the care of the foster couple and placed into Bidura Children's Home.
In September 1970, Folbigg moved into the home of Mr and Mrs Marlborough, a

Leonard Lake (October 29, 1945 – June 6, 1985) was an American serial killer. He often used the alias Leonard Hill. The crimes he committed with Charles Ng became known when Lake committed suicide by taking a cyanide pill shortly after being arrested for a firearms offense.
Lake was born in San Francisco, California. His parents separated when he was 6 years old, after which he and his siblings were sent to live with their grandparents. He was reportedly a bright child, but had an obsession with pornography that stemmed from taking nude photos of his sisters, apparently with the encouragement of his grandmother. It was also alleged that Lake extorted sexual favors from his sisters.
In 1965 at age 19, Lake joined the Marine Corps and served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War as a radar operator. Diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, Lake was eventually given a medical discharge in 1971 and underwent psychotherapy. Back in civilian life, he lived in San Jose. He briefly attended San Jose State University, but dropped out after one semester. It is believed that he settled in a hippie commune in the early 1970's. Lake married in 1975, but the marriage dissolved quickly

Moses Sithole (born 17 November 1964) is a South African serial killer who committed the "ABC Murders", so named because they began in Atteridgeville, continued in Boksburg and finished in Cleveland, a suburb of Johannesburg.
Sithole was born in Vosloorus, a poor neighborhood of Boksburg, Gauteng in apartheid-era South Africa. When he was five, his father died, and his mother abandoned the family. Sithole and his siblings spent the next three years in an orphanage, where he later said they were mistreated. He ran away back to his mother, who sent him back to the orphanage. He eventually moved in with his older brother.
He began raping women in his twenties, claiming three victims before one finally testified against him. He was sent to prison, during which he himself was sexually assaulted by other prisoners. His murder spree began in 1994, shortly after his release.
Sithole would gain access to victims by pretending to be a businessman and offering them work, going so far as to invent a fictional charity organization. Once he had gained their trust, he would offer to walk them through a veld (an Afrikaans word literally meaning "field") to the "business headquarters" until they

Nathaniel White (born July 28, 1960) is an African American serial killer. Active in the Hudson Valley region of New York during the early 1990s, White confessed to beating and stabbing six women to death while on parole.
White claimed to have found inspiration for his first murder while watching Robocop 2: "The first girl I killed was from a 'Robocop' movie... I seen him cut somebody’s throat then take the knife and slit down the chest to the stomach and left the body in a certain position. With the first person I killed I did exactly what I saw in the movie."
This first killing took place on March 25, 1991—after White had been convicted of abducting a 16-year-old girl, but before he started his prison sentence—and police did not make the connection at the time. In a plea bargain that would later be heavily criticized, White had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for the abduction and would therefore be eligible for parole after just one year. White was paroled in April 1992 and returned to Orange County, New York. White's first victim was the young niece of his girlfriend, whom he killed at the end of June, and he killed four others during the month of July.
White's first victim was

Alexander Nikolayevich Spesivtsev (Russian: Александр Николаевич Спесивцев) is a Russian man who was accused of killing up to 80 people and cannibalizing some of his victims. His mother, Ludmila, lured some of the victims into their apartment under different pretenses and went unnoticed due to her inconspicuous babushka appearance. She would dispose of the remains by throwing them into the Aba river late at night. Alexander kept a diary detailing some of his crimes and did not deny his actions when captured. He was ruled insane by a court and committed to a psychiatric hospital, and had previously been confined to a mental institution for 3 years after torturing and killing his girlfriend. The only living witness, 15-year-old Olga Galtseva, was forced to eat soup made out of her friend. She died a day after being discovered.

William Patrick Fyfe (born 27 February 1955) is a Canadian serial killer convicted of killing five women in the Montreal area of Quebec, although he claims to have killed four others. He allegedly killed his first victim in 1979 at age of 24.
Billy Fyfe was born in Toronto, Ontario. He was raised by an aunt and moved from Central Canada to Montreal (Parc Extension) in 1958. He lived as a normal child, although friends did have suspicions about this boy as he he grew up. As an adult, he worked as a handyman.
A finger print left on a door frame at Mary Glen's house and DNA evidence led police to charge Fyfe for the murders. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) arrested him on 22 December 1999, while he was returning to his pick-up truck after eating at a Husky Truck Stop near Barrie Ontario. He has confessed to only a portion of the crimes he is suspected of committing.
Fyfe's preliminary hearing began on 6 November 2000. Jean Lecours was the crown prosecutor heading up the case against Fyfe. He is now serving a life sentence in a psychiatric hospital in Saskatchewan. The four last victims he admitted to, only after being incarcerated.
He is also suspected by Montreal Police of being

Łucjan Staniak is a Polish serial killer. He was convicted of murdering six women from 1964 until his arrest in 1967. He confessed to a total of 20 murders (this number, however, is disputed as being coerced by detectives). He was dubbed The Red Spider by the press, a nickname derived from his correspondence with the police and news media scribbled with red ink.

Maria Catherina Swanenburg (Leiden 9 September 1839 - Gorinchem 11 April 1915) was a Dutch serial killer, who murdered at least 27, and was suspected of killing more than 90 people.
Swanenburg was the daughter of Clemens Swanenburg and Johanna Dingjan. After her first two daughters died at a young age, she married Johannes van der Linden on 13 May 1868. The result of this marriage was five sons and two daughters. The marriage lasted until 29 January 1886. Her nickname was Goeie Mie, also spelt as Goede Mie in modern Dutch (which translates as Good Mee) which she got for taking care of children and ill people in the poor neighbourhood of Leiden in which she lived.
It was established with certainty she poisoned at least 102 people with arsenic of which 27 died between 1880 and 1883. The investigation included more than ninety suspicious deaths. Forty-five of the survivors sustained chronic health problems after ingesting the poison. Swanenburg's motive was the money she would receive either through the victims' insurance or their inheritance. She had secured most of the insurance policies herself. Her first victim was her own mother in 1880; shortly after this, she killed her father

Thomas Quick (born Sture Ragnar Bergwall, 26 April 1950 in Korsnäs, Falun, Sweden) is a convicted Swedish criminal who has previously confessed to more than 30 murders, although he has only eight convictions, five of which have been overturned. With no technical evidence, the only evidence police have held on Quick are his own confessions; elements in these confessions that have been judged to match classified facts from the police dossiers on the crimes in question (e.g. clothing and birthmarks of victims). The credibility of Quick's confessions have been widely debated in the Swedish media. Critics of these confessions, and the trials, claim that Quick never murdered anyone, but that he is a compulsive liar. In December 2008 Quick recanted his confessions, and denied taking part in any of the murders for which he was convicted.
About 1990-91 Quick was sentenced to lengthy prison terms for armed robbery, and consigned to closed psychiatric care. During therapy he confessed to some 20 murders committed in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland between 1964 and 1993. One of his confessions led to the solving of an 18 year old murder considered to be unsolvable, and another to the

William George Heirens (November 15, 1928 – March 5, 2012) was a convicted American serial killer who confessed to three murders in 1946. Heirens was called The Lipstick Killer due to a notorious message scrawled in lipstick at a crime scene. At the time of his death, Heirens was reputably the world's longest serving prisoner, having spent 65 years in prison.
He spent the later years of his sentence at the Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon, Illinois (Inmate No. C-06103). Though he remained imprisoned until his death, Heirens had recanted his confession and claimed to be a victim of coercive interrogation and police brutality.
Charles Einstein wrote a novel called The Bloody Spur about Heirens. The novel was later adapted into the film While the City Sleeps by Fritz Lang.
On March 5, 2012, Heirens died at the UIC Medical Center.
Heirens grew up in Lincolnwood, a suburb of Chicago. His family was poor and his parents argued incessantly leading Heirens to wander the streets to avoid listening to them. He took to crime and later claimed that he mostly stole for fun and to release tension. He never sold anything he had stolen.
At the age of 11, Heirens claimed to have witnessed a

The Cleveland Torso Murderer (also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run) was an unidentified serial killer who killed and dismembered at least 12 victims in the Cleveland, Ohio, area in the 1930s.
The official number of murders credited to the Cleveland Torso Murderer is 12, although recent research has shown there may have been more. The 12 victims were killed between 1935 and 1938, but some, including lead Cleveland Detective Peter Merylo, believe that there may have been 40 or more victims in the Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Youngstown, Ohio, areas between the 1920s and 1950s. Two strong candidates for addition to the list of those killed are the unknown victim nicknamed the "Lady of the Lake," found on September 5, 1934, and Robert Robertson, found on July 22, 1950.
The victims were usually drifters whose identities were never determined, although there were several exceptions. Victims numbers 2, 3, and 8 were identified as Edward Andrassy, Flo Polillo, and possibly Rose Wallace, respectively. Invariably, all the victims, male and female, appeared to be from the lower class of society—easy prey in Depression-era Cleveland. Many were known as "working poor," who had nowhere

Edward Theodore "Ed" Gein ( /ˈɡiːn/; August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984) was an American murderer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. After police found body parts in his house in 1957, Gein confessed to killing two women – tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, in 1957.
Initially found unfit to stand trial, following confinement in a mental health facility he was tried in 1968 for the murder of Worden and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he spent in a mental hospital. The body of Bernice Worden was found in Gein's shed; her head and the head of Mary Hogan were found inside his house. Robert H. Gollmar, the judge in the Gein case, wrote: "Due to prohibitive costs, Gein was tried for only one murder — that of Mrs. Worden." With fewer than three murders attributed to him, Gein does not meet the traditional definition of a serial killer. His case influenced the creation of several fictional serial killers, including

Frederick Walter Stephen West (29 September 1941 – 1 January 1995), was a British serial killer. Between 1967 and 1987, he alone, and later, he and his wife Rosemary, tortured, raped and murdered at least 11 young women and girls, many at the couple's homes. Rosemary West also murdered Fred's stepdaughter (his first wife's biological daughter) Charmaine, while he was serving a prison sentence for theft. The majority of the murders occurred between May 1973 and August 1979 at their home in 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.
The pair were finally apprehended and charged in 1994. Rose West was jailed for life, in November 1995, after having been found guilty on 10 counts of murder. Fred West was never convicted of any murders, however, as he had committed suicide while on remand 10 months earlier. Their house at Cromwell Street was demolished in 1996 and the space converted into a landscaped footpath, connecting the street to St. Michaels Square.
Fred West was born into a poor family of farm workers in Bickerton Cottage, Much Marcle, Herefordshire, to Walter Stephen West (5 July 1914 – 28 March 1992) and Daisy Hannah Hill (1922-6 February 1968). He was the second of their six children.

Gerard John Schaefer (Wisconsin, March 25, 1946 – December 3, 1995) was an American serial killer from Florida. He was imprisoned in 1973 for murders he committed as a Martin County, Florida Sheriff's deputy.
While he was convicted of two murders, he was suspected of many others. Schaefer frequently appealed against his conviction, yet privately boasted — both verbally and in writing — of having murdered over 30 women and girls.
Gerard John Schaefer was raised in Atlanta, Georgia until 1960, when he and his family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Schaefer did not get along well with his father, who he believed favored his sister. In his teens, Schaefer became obsessed with women's panties and also became a peeping tom, spying on a neighbor girl named Leigh Hainline. He would later admit to killing animals in his youth and cross dressing, although at other times he claimed the latter was solely to avoid the draft into the Vietnam War (which he did).
After graduating from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 1964, Schaefer went to college, during which time he got married. In 1969 he became a teacher, but was soon fired for "totally inappropriate behavior," according to the principal.

Javed Iqbal Mughal (1956 in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan – October 8, 2001 in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan) was a Pakistani serial killer who was found guilty of the sexual abuse and murder of 100 children. This is disputed now because 26 of the children he claimed to have killed were found alive after his death. The case stands officially closed but allegedly not well investigated.
In December 1999, Iqbal sent a letter to police and a local Lahore newspaper confessing to the murders of 100 boys, all aged between six and 16. In the letter, he claimed to have strangled and dismembered the victims - mostly runaways and orphans living on the streets of Lahore - and disposed of their bodies using vats of hydrochloric acid. He then dumped the remains in a local river. In his house, police and reporters found bloodstains on the walls and floor with the chain on which Iqbal claimed to have strangled his victims, photographs of many of his victims in plastic bags. These items were neatly labeled with handwritten pamphlets. Two vats of acid with partially dissolved human remains were also left in the open for police to find, with a note claiming "the bodies in the house have deliberately not been

Juana Barraza (born 1956) is a Mexican professional wrestler and serial killer dubbed La Mataviejitas (Sp. "The Old Lady Killer") sentenced to 759 years in jail for killing eleven elderly women. The first murder attributed to Mataviejitas has been dated variously to the late 1990s and to a specific killing on 17 November 2003. The authorities and the press have given various estimates as to the total number of the killer's victims, with estimated totals ranging from 24 to 49 deaths.
Juana Barraza was born in Pachuca, Hidalgo, a rural area north of Mexico City. Barraza's mother was an alcoholic who reportedly exchanged her for three beers to a man who repeatedly raped her in his care, and by whom she became pregnant with a boy. She had four children in total, although her eldest son died from injuries sustained in a mugging. Prior to her arrest, Barraza was a professional wrestler under the ring name La Dama del Silencio (The Silent Lady). She had an obsession with lucha libre, a form of Mexican masked professional wrestling in which the wrestlers engage in titanic mock battles.
All of Barraza's victims were women aged 60 or over, most of whom lived alone. She bludgeoned or

Julian Koltun (born 1950 in Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish serial killer who raped seven women, killing two of them, and drank their blood.
Between 1980 and 1981 he is thought to have killed women and attacked others in several farming communities in Poland. Koltun was sentenced to life in prison for these crimes in 1982. He was sentenced to death in August of 1982.
On August 31, 1980 Koltun's his first victim was a Russian woman close to the Polish-Soviet Union border. She survived the attack. In the four months that followed Koltun attacked, as far as is known, six other women.
The first of his two attacks with a deadly outcome was committed on September 17, 1980. He left the body so badly mutilated that he became known as "the vampire".
Koltun was arrested on January 1981, and admitted his crimes to a series of psychiatrists.

An unknown serial killer, popularly known today as the Servant Girl Annihilator, preyed upon the city of Austin, Texas (1885 population approximately 17,000) during the years 1884 and 1885. The series of murders was referred to by contemporary sources as "The Servant Girl Murders." The December 26, 1885 issue of The New York Times reported that the "murders were committed by some cunning madman, who is insane on the subject of killing women."
According to Texas Monthly, seven females (five black, two white), and one black male were murdered. Additionally, six women and two men were seriously injured. All of the victims were attacked indoors while asleep in their beds. Five of the female victims were then dragged, unconscious but still alive, and killed outdoors. Three of the female victims were severely mutilated while outdoors. Only one of the murdered female victims was mutilated indoors. According to Texas Monthly, all of the victims were posed in a similar manner. Six of the murdered female victims had a "sharp object" inserted into their ears. The series of murders ended with the killing of two white women, Eula Phillips, age 17, and Susan Hancock, who was attacked while

Dean Phillip Carter (born August 30, 1955) is a convicted serial killer currently housed on San Quentin, California's Death row. He has been convicted (in two separate trials) of the murder of four women: Susan Knoll, Jillette Mills, Bonnie Guthrie, and Janette Cullins.
Carter was born the illegitimate son of a half-Eskimo woman in Nome, Alaska. He was adopted by a former police and fire chief in Nome. When he was 12, Carter was declared a delinquent child and committed to a youth camp, from which he attempted to run away at least three times. He later was placed in a foster home. Carter's crimes continued and "by the time he was 14 or 15, he was a fairly confirmed burglar." He later served adult prison terms in Oregon for auto theft and in Alaska for burglary.
In 1980, Carter was employed by the Tanana Chiefs Conference in Fairbanks, Alaska. TCC was a federally funded non-profit organization which operated the Video Center. The Video Center was a project to provide employment related training to the members of the Doyon region of interior Alaska. Carter worked as a production assistant and cameraman. During his tenure at the Video Center, Carter was on probation for cocaine

Herbert William Mullin (born April 18, 1947) is a serial killer who committed 13 murders in California in the early 1970s.
Mullin was born in Salinas, California but was raised in Santa Cruz. His father, a World War II veteran, was strict but not abusive. He frequently discussed his heroic war activities and showed his son how to use a gun at an early age. Mullin had numerous friends at school and was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" by his classmates. However, shortly after graduating from high school, one of his best friends was killed in a car accident, and Mullin was devastated. He built a shrine to his deceased friend in his bedroom. Later he expressed fears that he was homosexual, even though he had a longtime girlfriend at the time.
In 1969, at the age of 21, Mullin allowed his family to commit him to a mental hospital. Over the next few years, he would enter various institutions, but would discharge himself after only a short stay. He extinguished cigarettes on his own skin, attempted to enter the priesthood, and got evicted from an apartment after he repeatedly pounded on the floor, shouting at people who were not there.
Many years later, famed FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler

Heriberto "Eddie" Seda (born July 31, 1967) is an American serial killer who struck New York City from 1990 to 1993. Before being caught on June 18, 1996, Seda killed three people and critically wounded four. Seda is believed to have admired San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer for avoiding capture. Seda was convicted in 1998, and sentenced to 83 years and 4 months in prison. He will be eligible for parole when he is 113 years old.
Seda gave the impression of being a very religious man and attended church regularly. He lived with his mother and half sister in East New York, where he was unemployed and often kept to himself. At the age of 16, Seda dropped out of high school when he was caught carrying a weapon.
On November 17, 1989, East New York’s 75th Precinct began receiving letters with the heading: "This is the zodiac". The first letter contained a warning of 12 murders, one for each sign in the Zodiac. The letter also claimed that one murder had already taken place, but with no evidence the police dismissed the letter as a hoax, which the police are accustomed to receiving. The letter contained a drawing of a circle with lines through it dividing the circle into 12 sections, each

John Reginald Halliday Christie (8 April 1899 – 15 July 1953), born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, was a notorious English serial killer active in the 1940s and early 1950s. He murdered at least eight females – including his wife Ethel – by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. Christie moved out of Rillington Place in March 1953, and shortly afterwards the bodies of three of his victims were discovered hidden in an alcove in his kitchen. His wife's body was found beneath the floorboards of the front room. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife's murder, for which he was hanged.
While serving as an infantryman during World War I, Christie was apparently injured in a gas attack, which he claimed left him permanently unable to speak loudly. He turned to crime following his discharge from the army and was imprisoned several times, for offences including theft and assault. On the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he was accepted for service in the War Reserve Police, when the authorities failed to check his criminal record. He committed his murders between 1943 and 1953, usually by strangling his victims after he had rendered them unconscious

Patrick Mackay (born September 25, 1952) is a British serial killer who confessed to murdering eleven people in England in the mid 1970s.
As a child, Mackay was frequently a victim of physical abuse at the hands of his violent, alcoholic father Harold. When Mackay was ten, Harold died from complications of alcoholism and a weak heart. His final words to his son were 'remember to be good'. Patrick was said to be unable to come to terms with the loss, telling people Harold was still alive and keeping a photograph of his father on his person.
Later in his youth, he suffered from extreme tantrums and fits of anger, indulged in animal cruelty and arson (at one point setting the pet tortoise on fire), bullied younger children, stole from elderly women's homes and people in the street, and even attempted to kill his mother and aunt. He also attempted to kill a younger boy, and later said he'd have succeeded had he not been restrained, and attempted to set fire to a Catholic church. Because of such incidents, he spent his teenage years in and out of mental homes and institutions. At 15, he was diagnosed as a psychopath by a psychiatrist, Dr. Leonard Carr. Carr predicted Mackay would grow

William Burke (1792 - January 28, 1829) was an Irish-Scots serial killer who, with William Hare, committed a notorious series of murders in Edinburgh in the 19th century.
Burke was born in Urney, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. After trying his hand at a variety of trades there and serving as an officer's servant in the Donegal Militia, he left his wife and two children in Ireland and emigrated to Scotland about 1817, working as a navvy for the Union Canal. He acquired a mistress, Helen MacDougal, and afterwards worked as a labourer, weaver, baker and a cobbler. By 1827 he was living in a lodging-house in Edinburgh kept by Hare, another Irish labourer, and Maggie Laird.
Between 1827 and 1828, Burke and Hare murdered nine people and sold the bodies to medical schools to use as cadavers. They were both brought in for questioning, and Hare eventually testified against Burke in return for prosecutorial immunity.
Burke was found guilty and hanged at Edinburgh's Lawnmarket on January 28, 1829. According to a report in The Scotsman, "During the time of the wretched man's suspension, not a single indication of pity was observable among the vast crowd: on the contrary, every countenance

Chester Dewayne Turner (born November 5, 1966 in Warren, Arkansas) is a convicted serial killer. On April 30, 2007, he was convicted of the murders of 10 women in Los Angeles, and was also found guilty in the death of the unborn child of one of his victims. Prosecutors have called Turner "one of the most prolific serial killers in the city’s history". On July 10, 2007, Turner was sentenced to death.
Turner moved to Los Angeles with his mother when he was five years old, after his parents separated. He attended public schools in Los Angeles but dropped out of high school. Working for Domino's Pizza as a cook and delivery person as a young man, he lived with his mother until she moved to Utah. After that, he moved around to different homeless shelters and missions.
Turner has been convicted of 11 murders that occurred in Los Angeles between 1987 and 1998. The first nine of these murders took place in a four-block-wide corridor that ran on either side of Figueroa Street between Gage Avenue and 108th Street:
The last two murders occurred outside of this corridor in Los Angeles County:
The Vance murder was witnessed by a bystander at a neighboring trailer park. Turner was jailed seven

The Daytona Beach killer is a serial killer responsible for the murders of four women in the Daytona Beach area from December 2005–December 2007. The killer has never been apprehended. The involvement of a serial killer was feared after the discovery of the first three victims.
The first known victim was 45-year-old Laquetta Gunther, who was found in an alley on December 26, 2005. She had been shot in the back of the head. DNA was recovered from the scene. The second victim was 34-year-old Julie Green, found January 14, 2006. She had also been shot in the back of the head. No DNA was recovered, but tire tracks were found. The tires were for a 2003 Taurus or Sable and in fact the exact tires were later found. Just over a month later, on February 24, 2006 police found the body of Iwana Patton, 35, on a dirt road. She had been shot, but not in the back of the head, and possibly had struggled with her killer. DNA was recovered, along with a shell casing that allowed police to identify the make and model of pistol used. (.40-caliber Smith & Wesson Sigma Series VE.) Ballistics from recovered bullets and recovered DNA matched. Authorities received an anonymous telephone call describing

Derrick Todd Lee (born November 5, 1968 in St. Francisville, Louisiana) is a convicted serial killer, nicknamed the Baton Rouge Serial Killer.
He was linked by DNA to the deaths of seven women in the Baton Rouge and Lafayette areas in Louisiana, and in 2004 was convicted of the murders of Geralyn DeSoto and Charlotte Murray Pace. Newspapers have suggested Lee can be linked to other unsolved murders in the area, but the police lacked DNA evidence to prove these connections. After Lee's arrest, it was discovered that another serial killer, Sean Vincent Gillis, was operating in the Baton Rouge area during the same time as Lee.
Lee's methods varied with nearly each murder. Similarities between the crimes included the removal of cell phones from the victim's belongings, and a lack of any visible signs of forced entry into the location where the victim was attacked. Most of the murders were committed in the area around Louisiana State University (LSU). Two of the victims' bodies were discovered at the Whiskey Bay boat launch, approximately 30 miles west of Baton Rouge, just off Interstate 10.
ReliaGene Technologies Inc. linked Lee to the January 2002 slaying of Geralyn Barr DeSoto.

Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 13, 2001) was an American criminal, convicted of murder in 11 different cases and once listed as America's most prolific serial killer; he later recanted his confessions, and flatly stated "I am not a serial killer" in a letter to researcher Brad Shellady. Lucas confessed to involvement in about 600 murders, but a more widely circulated total of about 350 murders committed by Lucas is based on confessions deemed "believable" by a Texas-based Lucas Task Force, a group which was later criticized by then-Attorney General of Texas, Jim Mattox, and others for sloppy police work and taking part in an extended "hoax".
Beyond his recantation, some of Lucas' confessions have been challenged as inaccurate by a number of critics, including law enforcement and court officials. Lucas claimed to have been initially subjected to poor treatment and coercive interrogation tactics while in police custody, and to have confessed to murders in an effort to improve his living conditions. Amnesty International reported "the belief of two former state Attorneys General that Lucas was in all likelihood innocent of the crime for which he was sentenced to

Peter Moore (born 1940) is a Welsh serial killer who owned and managed a number of cinemas in North Wales. He murdered four men in 1995. Due to his attire he was dubbed the "man in black".
Between September and December 1995, he stabbed to death and mutilated four men "for fun". He was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 1996.
During his trial, Moore told the jury the crimes were committed by a homosexual lover he nicknamed "Jason" after the killer in the Friday the 13th horror films. The jury found him guilty on all counts.
During his time in Wakefield Prison Moore befriended Harold Shipman, the serial killer and former GP who hanged himself in January 2004. In June 2008, Moore was told by the High Court that he would spend the rest of his life in prison.On 3 March 2011 Moore challenged the ruling in the European Court of Human Rights, with a view to having his sentence quashed and such sentences outlawed throughout Europe. However, on 17 January 2012 it was announced that his appeal had failed.
On 13 October 2011 it was falsely reported that Moore had died at Broadmoor hospital on 30 July.

"Sister" Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan (1868–1962) was a Windsor, Connecticut nursing home proprietor and serial killer who systematically murdered at least five people by poison; one was her second husband, Michael Gilligan, and the rest were residents of her nursing home. It is possible that she was involved in more deaths; authorities found 48 deaths total from her nursing homes.
Amy E. Duggan was born in October 1868 to James Duggan and Mary Kennedy in Milton (a suburb of Litchfield), Connecticut, the eighth of ten children. She was taught at the Milton school and went to the New Britain Normal school in 1890.
Amy married James Archer in 1897. A daughter, Mary J. Archer, was born in December 1897. The Archers got their first job as caretakers in 1901. They were hired to take care of John Seymour, an elderly widower, and settled in his home at Newington, Connecticut. Seymour died in 1904. His heirs turned the residence into a boarding house for the elderly. The Archers were allowed to stay. They provided care for the elderly for a fee and in turn paid rent to Seymour's family. They ran the house under the name of "Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly".
In 1907, Seymour's heirs

Hotchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj (born April 6, 1944), better known as Charles Sobhraj, is a serial killer of Indian and Vietnamese origin, who preyed on Western tourists throughout Southeast Asia during the 1970s. Nicknamed "the Serpent" and "the Bikini Killer" for his skill at deception and evasion, he allegedly committed at least 12 murders. He was convicted and jailed in India from 1976 to 1997, but managed to live a life of leisure even in prison. After his release, he retired as a celebrity in Paris. He returned to Nepal and was arrested and tried there. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on August 12, 2004; the Supreme Court of Nepal convicted him and ordered life imprisonment on 30 July 2010.
While Sobhraj is widely believed to be a psychopath, his motives for killing differed from those of most serial killers. Sobhraj was not driven to murder by deep-seated, violent impulses, but as a means to sustain his adventurous lifestyle. That, as well as his cunning and cultured personality, made him a celebrity long before his release from prison. Sobhraj enjoyed the attention, charging large amounts of money for interviews and film rights; he has been the subject of

Karl Denke (August 12, 1870 – December 22, 1924) was a serial killer from Germany.
Denke was born in Münsterberg, Silesia in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Ziębice in Poland). There is not a great deal of information about his early life, but in adulthood he was well liked in his community, and worked as an organ player at the local church.
On December 20, 1924, Denke was arrested after attacking a man at his house with an axe. Police searched Denke's home and found human flesh in huge jars of curing salts. A ledger contained the details of minimum 42 people Denke had murdered and cannibalized between 1914 and 1918. It is thought he even sold the flesh of his victims at the Breslau (today's Wrocław) market, as pork.
The day after his arrest, Denke hanged himself in his cell.

Richard Francis Cottingham is a serial killer from New Jersey operating in New York between 1967 and 1980. He was nicknamed 'the torso killer', due to his habit of dismembering his victims, usually leaving nothing but a torso behind. In one case, he dismembered two prostitutes in a motel room, taking the hands and heads with him before setting the room on fire. He was eventually convicted of murder in 1981 after being caught fleeing an attempted murder. Several books have been written about him including The Torso Killer and "The Prostitute Murders" (ISBN 1-55817-518-0) both written by Rod Leith, a newspaper writer and local historian who had covered Cottingham's case from the beginning. Officially Cottingham killed six people but he claims between 85 and 100 murders.

Clifford Robert Olson, Jr. (January 1, 1940 – September 30, 2011) was a convicted Canadian serial killer who confessed to murdering two children and nine youths in the early 1980s.
Christine Weller, 12, from Surrey, British Columbia was abducted on November 17, 1980. Her body was found more than a month later on Christmas Day; she had been strangled with a belt and stabbed repeatedly. On April 16, 1981, Colleen Marian Daignault, 13, vanished. It was five months before her body was found. On April 22, 1981, Daryn Todd Johnsrude, 16, was abducted and killed; his body was found less than two weeks later. On May 19, 1981, 16-year-old Sandra Wolfsteiner was murdered, and 13-year-old Ada Anita Court was murdered in June 1981.
Six victims followed in quick succession in July 1981. Simon Partington, 9, was abducted, raped and strangled on the second day of the month. Judy Kozma, a 14-year old from New Westminster, was raped and strangled a week later. Her body was discovered on July 25 near Weaver Lake. The next victims were Raymond King Jr., 15, abducted on July 23, raped and bludgeoned to death; Sigrun Arnd, an 18-year old German tourist, raped and bludgeoned two days later; Terri Lyn

Maury Troy Travis (October 25, 1965 – June 10, 2002) was an American serial killer from Ferguson, Missouri, who committed suicide in a St. Louis county jail, after being arrested for murder. Travis was named in a Federal criminal complaint for the murders of two women. At the time of the murders, Travis was a waiter and on parole for a 1989 robbery. While in his letter Travis claimed to have murdered 17 women, some authorities were doubtful; others thought he may have murdered up to 20 women.
Travis is believed with some certainty to have killed two women, Alysia Greenwade, whose body was discovered 1 April 2011 in Illinois (after having been last seen in Missouri), and Betty James, whose body was discovered about two months later in Missouri (after having been last seen in Illinois).
From May to October 2001 four other women were tortured and strangled: Teresa Wilson, Verona Thompson, Yvonne Crues and Brenda Beasley. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a profile piece on Wilson, and Travis responded to it with a letter and a map. The letter had a return address of I THRALLDOM, a web bondage site, but no other identification. However, the map was recognized to have come from

Peter Kürten (26 May 1883 – 2 July 1931) was a German serial killer dubbed The Vampire of Düsseldorf by the contemporary media. He committed a series of sex crimes, assaults and murders against adults and children, most notoriously from February to November 1929 in Düsseldorf.
Kürten was born into a poverty-stricken, abusive family in Mülheim am Rhein, the third of 13 children. As a child, he witnessed his alcoholic father repeatedly sexually assault his mother and his sisters. He followed in his father's footsteps, and was soon sexually abusing his sisters. He engaged in petty criminality from a young age, and was a frequent runaway. He later claimed to have committed his first murders at the age of nine, drowning two young friends while swimming. He moved with his family to Düsseldorf in 1894 and received a number of short prison sentences for various crimes, including theft and arson. As a youth he was employed by the local dogcatcher, a job which allowed him to indulge in animal cruelty.
Kürten progressed from torturing animals to attacks on people. He committed his first provable murder in 1913, strangling a 10-year-old girl, Christine Klein, during the course of a burglary.

Richard Trenton Chase (May 23, 1950 – December 26, 1980) was an American schizophrenic serial killer who killed six people in the span of a month in Sacramento, California. He was nicknamed "The Vampire of Sacramento" because he drank his victims' blood and cannibalized their remains.
A self-described victim of abuse at the hands of his mother, Chase exhibited by the age of 10 evidence of the Macdonald triad: enuresis, pyromania, and zoosadism. In his adolescence, he was known as an alcoholic and a chronic drug abuser. He suffered from erectile dysfunction due to "psychological problems stemming from repressed anger".
Chase developed hypochondria as he matured. He often complained that his heart would occasionally "stop beating", or that "someone had stolen his pulmonary artery". He would hold oranges on his head, believing Vitamin C would be absorbed by his brain via diffusion. Chase also believed that his cranial bones had become separated and were moving around, so he shaved his head in order to watch this activity.
After leaving his mother's house (believing she was attempting to poison him), Chase rented an apartment with friends. Chase's roommates complained that he was

Władysław Mazurkiewicz (January 31, 1911 - January 31, 1957) was a Polish serial killer who lived in the city of Kraków, Poland and also had property in Warsaw.
He was nicknamed the "gentleman killer", and was charged with the murders of at least 30 people. He confessed to everything, by saying "Yes, that's true." He was convicted and executed by hanging.

Yoo Young-chul (born in 1970) is a South Korean serial killer and self-confessed cannibal. Although he admitted to murdering 21 people, mostly prostitutes and wealthy old men, the Seoul Central District Court convicted him of 20 murders (one case was dismissed on a technicality). Yoo burned three and mutilated at least 11 of his victims, admitting he ate the livers of some of them. He committed his crimes between September 2003 and July 2004, when he was arrested. Yoo explained his motives in front of a TV camera saying "Women shouldn't be sluts, and the rich should know what they've done." He was sentenced to death on June 19, 2005 by the Supreme Court.
His case, which appalled South Koreans, has fueled the debate on capital punishment in South Korea. Although the death penalty is still permissible under law, it has not been carried out since 1997. It appeared capital punishment might be abolished prior to Yoo's arrest, but support for the death penalty has grown since then.
The Seoul Central District Court said: "Murders of as many as 20 people are unprecedented in the nation and a very serious crime. The death penalty is inevitable for Yoo in light of the enormous pains

Futoshi Matsunaga (松永 太, Matsunaga Futoshi, born April 28, 1961) is a Japanese serial killer who both defrauded and tortured his victims in what is publicly known as the Kitakyusyu Serial Murder Incident (北九州連続殺人事件). He was convicted of six counts of murder and one count of manslaughter, including two children, between the years 1996 and 1998. He murdered his victims with an accomplice, Junko Ogata.
His crimes were so atrocious that most mass media were not willing to report the details. The Japan Times reported that prosecutors said "[the case] is without comparison in the criminal history of our country". Despite that, several writers, including Ryuzo Saki, published the details of the crimes.
Matsunaga was born in Kokura Kita-ku, Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka Prefecture and grew up in Yanagawa. He received good grades in school and had a charming personality, but tended to exhibit disciplinary problems. Eventually he was transferred to another high school because of his relationship with a junior high school girl. He married at 19, and had a son.
In October 1982, during his marriage, he became involved with Junko Ogata, in addition to the ten or so mistresses with whom he was already

Henri Désiré Landru (12 April 1869 – 25 February 1922) (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi deziʁe lɑ̃dʁy]) was a French serial killer and real-life "Bluebeard".
Landru was born in Paris. After leaving school, he spent four years in the French Army from 1887 – 1891. After he was discharged from service, he proceeded to have a sexual relationship with his cousin. She bore him a daughter, although Landru did not marry her; he married another woman two years later and had four children. He was swindled out of money by a fraudulent employer. He turned to fraud himself, operating scams that usually involved swindling elderly widows. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment in 1900 after being arrested and found guilty of fraud, the first of several such convictions. By 1914, Landru was estranged from his wife and working as a second-hand furniture dealer.
Landru began to put advertisements in the lonely hearts sections in Paris newspapers, usually along the lines of "Widower with two children, aged 43, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony." With World War I under way, many men were being killed in the trenches, leaving

Joseph Paul Franklin (born April 13, 1950) is an American serial killer. He has been convicted of several murders, and given six life sentences, as well as a death sentence. He confessed to the attempted shootings of two prominent men: the magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978 and Vernon Jordan, Jr., the civil rights activist, in 1980. Franklin has not been convicted in either of those cases.
Because Franklin has repeatedly changed his accounts of some cases, officials cannot determine the full extent of his crimes. His claims of racial motivation have been offset by a defense expert witness who testified in 1997 that Franklin was a paranoid schizophrenic who was not fit to stand trial.
He was born James Clayton Vaughn in Mobile, Alabama, to a poor family. He suffered severe physical abuse as a child. As early as high school, he had become interested first in evangelical Christianity, and Nazism, and later held memberships in both the National Socialist White People's Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1976 at the age of 26, he changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin. He selected Joseph Paul in honor of Paul Joseph Goebbels and Franklin after Benjamin Franklin.
He married in 1979 and

Mohammed Bijeh (Persian: محمد بيجه‎) (February 7, 1975 – March 16, 2005) was an Iranian serial killer. He confessed in court to raping and killing 16 young boys between March and September 2004, and was sentenced to 100 lashes followed by execution. All the boys were between 8 and 15 years old. In addition, he killed two adults.
On March 16, 2005, in Pakdasht, Iran, the town near the desert area where the killings occurred, in front of a crowd of about 5,000, Bijeh's shirt was removed and he was handcuffed to an iron post, where he received his lashings from different judicial officials. He fell to the ground more than once during the punishment but did not cry out. A relative of one of the victims managed to get past security and stab Bijeh. The mother of one of the victims put a blue nylon rope around his neck, and he was hoisted about 10 meters in the air by a crane until he died.

Paul Durousseau (born August 11, 1970) is an American serial killer who murdered seven young women (including two who were pregnant) in the southeast United States between 1997 and 2003. German authorities suspect he may have killed several local women when he was stationed there with the Army during the early 1990s. Typically, Durousseau would gain the victim’s trust, enter the victim’s home, tie their hands, rape, then strangle them to death. All of his known victims were young, single African-American women.
Paul Durousseau was born in Beaumont, Texas. Little is known publicly about Paul Durousseau's childhood. His first offenses with the law as an adult took place on December 18, 1991 and on January 21, 1992 for carrying a concealed firearm in California. In November 1992, he enlisted in the US Army and was stationed in Germany, where he met Natoca, who would later become his wife.
The two married in 1995 in Las Vegas. In 1996, they were transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia. On March 13, 1997, he was arrested for kidnapping and raping a young woman. However, in August of that year he was cleared of those charges. Soon after, he was found in possession of stolen goods. He was

Paul John Knowles (April 17, 1946 – December 18, 1974), also known as The Casanova Killer, was an American serial killer tied to the deaths of 18 people in 1974, though he claimed to have taken 35 lives.
Born in Orlando, Florida, his father gave him up to live in foster homes and reformatories after he was convicted of a petty crime. Knowles himself was first incarcerated at the age of 19, and in the years following he spent more time in prison. In early 1974, Knowles was serving time at Raiford Prison in Florida (now known as Florida State Prison) when he began corresponding with a divorcee in San Francisco named Angela Covic, who made a trip to the prison to visit Knowles. Upon her arrival, Knowles proposed to Covic. After she accepted his proposal, she became instrumental in getting Knowles released from prison by paying for his legal counsel. Upon his release, Knowles flew directly to California to be with her. After a psychic warned her of the entry of a new dangerous man in her life, Covic ended the relationship and called off the wedding.
Although this has never been verified, Knowles claimed to have murdered three people on the streets of San Francisco the night that Covic

Dennis Andrew Nilsen (born 23 November 1945) is a serial killer and necrophiliac, also known as the Muswell Hill Murderer and the Kindly Killer, who committed the murders of 15 young men in London, England between 1978 and 1983. He retained his victims' bodies for extended periods of time before dissecting their remains and disposing of them via burning or flushing the remains down a lavatory. Nilsen was convicted at the Old Bailey in November, 1983 of six counts of murder and two of attempted murder and is currently incarcerated at the HMP Full Sutton maximum security prison in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England.
Nilsen became known as the Muswell Hill Murderer as his later murders, which led to his detection, were committed at his home at 23 Cranley Gardens in the Muswell Hill district of North London. The description Kindly Killer came from his own belief that his method of murder, strangulation and drowning, followed by a ritual in which he bathed and dressed the bodies, was the most humane method of murder.
Owing to the similarities between the modus operandi of the murders, Nilsen has been described as the "British Jeffrey Dahmer."
Nilsen was born at 10 High Street,

Hélène Jégado (1803–1852) was a French domestic servant and serial killer. She is believed to have murdered as many as 36 people with arsenic over a period of 18 years. After an initial period of activity, between 1833 and 1841, she seems to have stopped for nearly ten years before a final spree in 1851.
Hélène Jégado was born on a small farm in Plouhinec (Morbihan), near Lorient in Brittany. She lost her mother at the age of seven and was sent to work with two aunts who were servants at the rectory of Bubry. After 17 years, she accompanied an aunt to the town of Séglien. She became a cook for the curé where an incident arose where she was accused of adding hemp from his grain house to his soup.
Her first suspected poisoning occurred in 1833 when she was employed by another priest, Fr. François Le Drogo, in the nearby village of Guern. In the three months, between June 28 and October 3, seven members of the household died suddenly, including the priest himself, his aging mother and father, and her own visiting sister, Anne Jégado. Her apparent sorrow and pious behaviour was so convincing she was not suspected. Coming shortly after the cholera epidemic of 1832 the deaths may have

Ian Brady (born Ian Duncan Stewart on 2 January 1938) is a Scottish serial killer, known primarily for the series of murders that he committed with his lover Myra Hindley in England from 1963 to 1965. Their crimes were dubbed the "Moors murders"; all but one of the known victims were buried along the Saddleworth Moor near Oldham in Lancashire.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1966, in 1985 he was moved to a mental hospital, and since 1999 has been trying to gain the right to commit suicide through hunger strikes. He has been force-fed through feeding tubes intermittently since beginning the strike.
Ian Duncan Stewart was born at the Rottenrow Maternity Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland and grew up in the Gorbals. He was adopted by a local family named Sloane as his mother could not afford to look after her newborn. His father has never been identified; his mother claimed that he was a journalist who died a few months before their son was born. As a child, Brady resented his illegitimacy. In 1949, he passed his exams and attended Shawlands Academy. Throughout school, he was recognised as a very bright pupil by his teachers, but one who never realised or achieved his

Angel Maturino Reséndiz, aka The Railroad Killer/The Railway Killer/The Railcar Killer (August 1, 1960 – June 27, 2006), was an itinerant Mexican serial killer responsible for as many as thirty murders across the United States and Mexico during the 1990s. Some also involved sexual assault. He became known as "The Railroad (or Railway) Killer" as most of his crimes were committed near railroads where he had jumped off the trains he was using to travel about the country. On June 21, 1999, he briefly became the 457th fugitive listed by the FBI on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list before surrendering to the Texas authorities on July 13. He was 39 years old.
Reséndiz had many aliases but was chiefly known and sought after as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez. One of his aliases, Ángel Reyes Reséndiz, was very close to the name Ángel Leoncio Reyes Recendis given on his birth certificate from Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla, Mexico.
By jumping on and off trains both within and across Mexico, Canada and the United States, generally crossing borders illegally, Reséndiz was able to evade the authorities for a considerable time. He also had no fixed addresses.
Reséndiz killed as many as 15 people with

Angelo Buono, Jr. (October 5, 1934 – September 21, 2002) was an American serial killer. Buono and his cousin Kenneth Bianchi together are known as the Hillside Stranglers.
Buono was born in Rochester, New York to first generation Italian-American emigrants from San Buono, Italy. In the time leading up to the killings, Buono had already developed a long criminal history, ranging from failure to pay child support and grand theft auto to assault and rape. In 1975, when Buono was 41, he came into contact with his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi.
A self-described "ladies' man", Buono persuaded Bianchi to join him in prostituting two women, holding them as virtual prisoners. In late 1977, the pair began killing other women as well, claiming 10 documented victims by the time they were arrested in early 1979. Buono was also said to have made women refer to him as "The Italian Stallion"; this has been reported on several television shows, including the Investigation Discovery show Deranged and A&E Television Network's Biography, and on truTv's Crime Library website.
The legal case against Buono was based largely upon Bianchi's testimony. Deciding that Bianchi was an unreliable and uncooperative

Anna Marie Hahn (née Filser; July 7, 1906 in Bavaria, Germany – December 7, 1938 at the Ohio Penitentiary) was a German-born American serial killer.
The youngest of 12 children, as a teenager she had an affair with a Viennese physician, or so she claimed—no records have been found of a Viennese doctor by the name she gave. They had a son she called Oskar (also spelled "Oscar"). Her scandalized family sent her to America in 1929, while her son remained in Bavaria with her parents. While staying with relatives Max and Anna Doeschel in Cincinnati, she met fellow German immigrant Philip Hahn; they married in 1930. Anna Marie briefly returned to Germany to get Oscar, then the trio set upon life as a family.
Hahn allegedly began poisoning and robbing elderly men and women in Cincinnati's German community to support her gambling habit. Ernst Kohler, who died on May 6, 1933, was believed to be her first victim. Hahn had befriended him shortly before his death; he left her a house in his will.
Her next alleged victim, Albert Parker, 72, also died soon after she began caring for him. Prior to Parker's death, she signed an I.O.U. for $1,000 that she borrowed from him, but after his death the

Belle Sorenson Gunness (born as Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth; November 11, 1859, Selbu, Norway – April 28, 1908?, La Porte, Indiana) was a Norwegian-American serial killer.
Standing five feet and eight inches (173 cm) tall and weighing over 200 pounds (91 kg), she was a physically strong woman. She killed most of her suitors and boyfriends, and her two daughters, Myrtle and Lucy. She may also have killed both of her husbands and all of her children, on different occasions. Her apparent motives involved collecting life insurance, cash and other valuables, and eliminating witnesses. Reports estimate that she killed between 25 and 40 people over several decades.
Gunness' origins are a matter of some debate. Most of her biographers state that she was born on November 11, 1859, near the lake of Selbu, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway, and christened Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset. Her parents were Paul Pedersen Størset (a stonemason) and Berit Olsdatter. She was the youngest of their eight children. They lived at Størsetgjerdet, a very small cotter's farm in Innbygda, 60 km southeast of Trondheim, the largest city in central Norway (Trøndelag).
An Irish TV documentary by Anne Berit Vestby aired on

John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer and rapist who sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978. Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home, buried three others elsewhere on his property, and discarded the remains of his last four known victims in a nearby river. He was convicted of 33 murders and sentenced to death for 12 of these killings. He was executed in May 1994.
Gacy later became known as the "Killer Clown" due to his charitable services at fundraising events, parades and children's parties where he would dress as "Pogo the Clown", a character he devised himself.
John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago, Illinois, the second of three children born to John Stanley Gacy (June 20, 1900 – December 25, 1969) and Marion Elaine Robinson (May 4, 1908 – December 14, 1989). Gacy was of Polish and Danish heritage. (His paternal grandparents had been born in Poland.) As a child, he was overweight and nonathletic. He was close to his two sisters and mother, but endured a difficult relationship with his father, an alcoholic who was physically abusive toward his wife and

Joseph Edward Duncan III (born February 25, 1963) is an American convicted serial killer and sex offender who is currently serving multiple death sentences and life sentences in conjunction with the 1997 kidnapping and murder of Anthony Martinez of Beaumont, California, and the 2005 kidnapping and murders of members of the Groene family of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He has also confessed but not been charged with the 1996 murder of two girls in Seattle, Washington.
Born in Tacoma, Washington, Duncan's lengthy criminal history dates to when he was 15 years old. In 1980, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexually assaulting a boy in Tacoma and as a result has spent most of his adult life in prison. He was paroled in 1994 but was returned to prison in 1997 for violating the terms of his parole.
In May 2005, Kootenai County, Idaho authorities discovered the bodies of Brenda Groene, her boyfriend, and her 13-year-old son in the family home near Coeur d'Alene. Authorities also noted that Groene's two other children were missing: Shasta, 8, and Dylan, 9. After an intense search for the two children, Shasta was found alive with Duncan at a restaurant in Coeur d'Alene nearly seven weeks

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Großmann, who commonly called himself just Carl Großmann (13 December 1863 – 5 July 1922), was a German serial killer. He committed suicide while awaiting execution without giving a full confession leaving the extent of his crimes and motives largely unknown.
Not a great deal is known about his early life, except that he had sadistic sexual tastes and soon picked up a number of convictions for child molestation. On 21 August in 1921, Großmann was arrested at his apartment in Berlin after neighbours heard screams and banging noises, followed by silence. The police burst in and searched the place, finding a young woman's freshly murdered body on the bed. Großmann was taken into custody by the police and charged with 1st degree murder. Neighbours reported that he seemed to have had a steady supply of female companions, mostly destitute-looking young women, over the last few years. Many went into the apartment but few emerged from it. During World War I, Großmann sold a lot of meat on the black market, and even had a hot dog stand at the nearby train station. It is believed the meat was the remains of his victims, their bones and other inedible parts being thrown

Marc Dutroux (born 6 November 1956) is a Belgian serial killer and child molester, convicted of having kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused six girls during 1995 to 1996, ranging in age from 8 to 19, four of whom he murdered. He was also convicted of having killed a suspected former accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, later proved insane. He was arrested in 1996, four years after the disappearance of his victims had begun, and has been in prison ever since, though he briefly escaped in April 1998. Dutroux's widely publicised trial took place in 2004. A number of shortcomings in the Dutroux investigation caused widespread discontent in Belgium with the country's criminal justice system, and the ensuing scandal was one of the reasons for the reorganisation of Belgium's law enforcement agencies.
Born in Ixelles, Belgium on 6 November 1956, Dutroux was the oldest of five children. His parents, both teachers, emigrated to the Belgian Congo, but returned to Belgium when Dutroux was four. They separated in 1971 and Dutroux stayed with his mother. He married at the age of 19 and fathered two children; the marriage ended in divorce in 1983. By then he already had had an affair with Michelle

Raúl Osiel Marroquín Reyes (b. ca. 1981 in Tampico, Tamaulipas) is a Mexican serial killer.
Marroquin confessed to luring gay men from bars in order to kill them. He tortured his four victims by hanging or choking them, but in two cases it is said that he released men he had kidnapped once he had received a ransom. He added that he would continue doing so if he could, claiming that homosexuality harmed society.
Marroquín, known as "El Sádico", was captured on January 23, 2006 and was found guilty of the murder of four victims.
Explaining himself, Marroquín said, "I snuffed out four homosexuals that in some way were affecting society." He also says he chose gays as his victims because "they're a bad example for kids".
He lured his victims in gay bars and, to avoid suspicion, always let them make the initial approach. He would later invite them to his apartment, where he strangled them and then asked the victim's family for a ransom. The dead bodies were later put inside suitcases and abandoned in different locations around Mexico City.
Marroquín is said to have a partner, Juan Enrique Madrid Manuel, who was presumably an assistant in the process of abducting victims.
On September

Ricardo "Richard" Muñoz Ramirez (born February 28, 1960) is a convicted serial killer awaiting execution on California's death row. Prior to his capture, Ramirez was dubbed the "Night Stalker" by the news media.
Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, the youngest of Julian and Mercedes Ramirez's five children. His father, a policeman who later became a laborer on the Santa Fe railroad, was abusive and believed in corporal punishment.
Ramirez may have been influenced into killing by his cousin, Mike, a Special Forces Vietnam War veteran who boasted of killing and torturing his Vietnamese enemies and showed him Polaroid pictures of his victims. These included pictures of the severed heads of Vietnamese women, who in other pictures had been shown fellating Mike. Ramirez was present the night Mike shot and killed his wife, and her blood splattered on Ramirez's face. Ramirez was 13 years old at the time.
On April 10, 1984, the body of 9-year-old Mei Leung was found dead in a hotel basement where Ramirez was living at the time. In 2009, Ramirez's DNA was matched to DNA obtained at the 1984 crime scene.
On June 28, 1984, 79-year-old Jennie Vincow was found dead in her apartment. She had

Stanislaw Modzelewski (born on 15 March 1929 in Szczepankowo near Łomża, died on 13 November 1969 in Warsaw) was a Polish serial killer known as "The Vampire of Gałkówek" active in Łódź, Poland during the 1950s. He completed three classes of primary school, he was a driver by occupation and he worked in Warsaw. In the period of 1952-1956 and in 1967, he murdered seven women and attempted a murder of six other women. Although he is believed to have murdered another, eighth victim (he even committed to it), it was never proven to him as the body was not found. He was sentenced to death and the execution by hanging was carried out in November 1969, in Warsaw.
Modzelewski murdered women in the age between 18 and 87 by strangling them with a scarf or with his bare hands. He took valuables as well as useless objects from his victims which he then threw away. He executed them with utmost cruelty. The murders had a sexual motive, the lower part of the victims' bodies were nude and the arrangement of the corpse suggested a penetration of genital organs. Modzelewski was a sadist but it was not verified whether he tortured the victims before or after the murder.
The list contains names of the

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (October 1794 – 17 August 1847) was an English artist, writer and criminal, widely believed to have been a multiple poisoner.
Wainewright was born into affluence and London literary society in Richmond, London, England but was orphaned when he was very young. His father's identity has never been firmly established. He may have been an apothecary, although it is more likely that he was a lawyer and came from a family that practised the law over many years. His mother died giving birth to him but of her interesting background we have a very complete picture. She was Ann, the daughter of Ralph Griffiths (1720-1803), for many years the editor of The Monthly Review. Thomas and his father lived in an extended family situation with his maternal grandfather at Linden House at Turnham Green in what was then London's rural periphery. Griffiths was well connected in the literary world and Thomas must have profitted from the society that visited Griffiths home. When Griffiths wrote his will in 1803 Thomas's father was already dead and he himself died later in that year. The child then came under the care of his maternal uncle, George Griffiths. He was educated at

Westley Allan Dodd (July 3, 1961 – January 5, 1993) was a convicted American serial killer and child molester. He has been called "one of the most evil killers in history". His execution on January 5, 1993, was the first legal hanging (at his own request) in the United States since 1965.
Westley Allan Dodd was born in Toppenish, Washington, on July 3, 1961. Unlike most serial killers, Dodd claimed he was never abused or neglected. He also reported that he grew up in a wealthy, happy family. However, The Seattle Times reported that Dodd described in a diary written during his imprisonment that his childhood did include pathnogenic experiences including enduring a father that was physically and verbally abusive, witnessing fights between his mother and father, and comporting an attempted suicide by his father.
Dodd began sexually abusing children when he was a teenager; his first victims were his own cousins. All his victims (over 50 in all) were boys below the age of 12, some of them as young as two. Dodd's sexual fantasies became increasingly violent over the years; as a young man, he wrote about wanting to eat the genitals of his victims.
He killed brothers Cole and William Neer

William Palmer (6 August 1824 – 14 June 1856), also known as the Rugeley Poisoner or the Prince of Poisoners, was an English doctor found guilty of murder in one of the most notorious cases of the 19th century. He was convicted for the 1855 murder of his friend John Cook, and was executed in public by hanging the following year. He had poisoned Cook with strychnine, and was suspected of poisoning several other people including his brother and his mother-in-law, as well as four of his children who died of "convulsions" before their first birthdays. Palmer made large sums of money from the deaths of his wife and brother after collecting on life insurance, and by defrauding his wealthy mother out of thousands of pounds, all of which he lost through gambling on horses.
Born in Rugeley, Staffordshire, William Palmer was the sixth of seven children to Sarah and Joseph Palmer. His father worked as a sawyer, and died when William was 12, leaving Sarah with a legacy of some £70,000.
As a seventeen-year-old, Palmer worked as an apprentice at a Liverpool chemist's, but was dismissed after three months following allegations that he stole money. He studied medicine in London, and qualified as a

Arthur John Shawcross (June 6, 1945 – November 10, 2008) was an American serial killer, also known as The Genesee River Killer in Rochester, New York. He claimed most of his victims after being paroled early following a conviction in the manslaughter of two children, which led to criticism of the justice system.
Shawcross was born in Kittery, Maine, but his family moved to Watertown in New York State when he was young. While several later tests showed Shawcross' intelligence to be sub-normal or even "borderline retarded", he received As and Bs in his first two years of grade school. His IQ was tested to be "low-normal" (between 86 and 92) when he was in the fifth grade. Shawcross was prone to behaviors such as bullying and physical violence. Shawcross dropped out of high school in 1960.
He was drafted at age 21 by the Army in April 1967. At this time, Shawcross divorced his first wife and gave up the rights to their eighteen-month-old son, whom he never saw again. After his tour of duty in Vietnam ended in September 1968, the Army assigned Shawcross to Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma as an armorer. His second wife Linda experienced several aspects of his disturbing behavior,

Elfriede Blauensteiner (22 January 1931 – 18 November 2003), dubbed the "Black Widow", was an Austrian serial killer who murdered at least three victims by poison. In each case, she inherited the victim's possessions.
Blauensteiner died from a brain tumor on 18 November 2003 in a Vienna Hospital.

Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot (17 January 1897 – 25 May 1946) was a French doctor and serial killer. He was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in his home in Paris during World War II. He is suspected of killing around 60 victims during his life, although the true number remains unknown.
Petiot was born 17 January 1897 in Auxerre, France. Later accounts make various claims of his delinquency and criminal acts during his youth, but it is unclear whether they were invented afterwards for public consumption. It should be noted, however, that a psychiatrist diagnosed him as mentally ill on 26 March 1914, and he was expelled from school many times. He finished his education in a special academy in Paris in July 1915.
During World War I, Petiot volunteered for the French army, entering service in January 1916.
In the Second Battle of the Aisne, he was wounded and gassed and exhibited more symptoms of mental breakdown. He was sent to various rest homes, where he was arrested for stealing army blankets, morphine, and other army supplies, as well as wallets, photographs, and letters, and he was jailed in Orléans. In a psychiatric hospital in

Mary Ann Cotton (born Mary Ann Robson in October 1832 in Low Moorsley, County Durham – died 24 March 1873) was an English woman convicted of murdering her children and believed to have murdered up to 21 people, mainly by arsenic poisoning.
Mary Ann Robson was born in October 1832 at Low Moorsley (now part of Houghton-le-Spring in the City of Sunderland) and baptised at St Mary's, West Rainton on 11 November. Her father Michael, a miner, was ardently religious and a fierce disciplinarian.
When Mary Ann was eight, her parents moved the family to the County Durham village of Murton, where she went to a new school and found it difficult to make friends. Soon after the move her father fell 150 feet (46 m) to his death down a mine shaft at Murton Colliery.
In 1843, Mary Ann's widowed mother, Margaret (née Lonsdale) married George Stott, with whom Mary Ann did not get along. At the age of 16, she moved out to become a nurse at Edward Potter's home in the nearby village of South Hetton. After three years there, she returned to her mother's home and trained as a dressmaker.
In 1852, at the age of 20, Mary Ann married colliery labourer William Mowbray in Newcastle Upon Tyne register office;

Nannie Doss (November 4, 1905 – June 2, 1965) was a serial killer responsible for the deaths of 11 people between the 1920s and 1954.
She finally confessed to the murders in October 1954, after her fifth husband died in a small hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In all, it was revealed that she had killed 4 husbands, 2 children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson, and a nephew.
Doss was born in Blue Mountain, Alabama as Nancy Hazle to Lou and James Hazle. Nannie was one of five children; she had one brother and three sisters. Both Nannie and her mother hated James, who was a controlling father and husband with a nasty streak. There is evidence that Doss was conceived illegitimately, as James and Lou married after 1905; census records also show that in 1905 she and her mother were living on their own. She had an unhappy childhood. She was a poor student who never learned to read well; her education was erratic because her father forced his children to work on the family farm instead of attending school. When she was around 7 years old, the family was taking a train to visit relatives in southern Alabama; when the train stopped suddenly, Nannie hit her head on the metal bar on the

Robert John Maudsley (born June 1953) is a British serial killer responsible for the murders of four people. He committed three of these murders in prison after receiving a life sentence for a single murder. He was alleged to have eaten part of the brain of one of three men he killed in prison, which earned him the nickname "Hannibal the Cannibal" among the British press.
He was one of 12 children, born in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, and spent most of his early years in Nazareth House (an orphanage run by nuns) in Crosby, Liverpool. At the age of eight, he was retrieved by his parents and beaten regularly until he was eventually removed from their care by social services. During the late 1960s, as a teenager, Maudsley was a rent boy in London to support his drug addiction. He was finally forced to seek psychiatric help after several suicide attempts. It was during his talk with doctors that he claimed to hear voices telling him to kill his parents. Maudsley claimed that he was raped as a child, and such early abuse would have left deep psychological scars. He is quoted as saying, 'If I had killed my parents in 1970, none of these people need have died.'
In 1973, Maudsley

The Burke and Hare murders (nickname West Port murders) were serial murders perpetrated in Edinburgh, Scotland, from November 1827 to October 31, 1828. The killings were attributed to Irish immigrants William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses of their 17 victims to provide material for dissection. Their purchaser was Doctor Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer whose students were drawn from Edinburgh Medical College. Their accomplices included Burke's mistress, Helen McDougal, and Hare's wife, Margaret Laird. From their method of killing their victims has come the word "burking", meaning to purposefully smother and compress the chest of a victim, and a derived meaning, to quietly suppress.
Before 1832, there were insufficient cadavers legitimately available for the study and teaching of anatomy in British medical schools. The University of Edinburgh was an institution universally renowned for medical sciences. As medical science began to flourish in the early nineteenth century, demand rose sharply, but at the same time, the only legal supply of cadavers—the bodies of executed criminals—had fallen due to a sharp reduction in the execution rate in the early nineteenth

Alexander "Sawney" Bean(e) was the legendary head of a 48-member clan in 15th- or 16th-century Scotland, reportedly executed for the mass murder and cannibalisation of over 1,000 people.
The story appears in The Newgate Calendar, a crime catalogue of the notorious Newgate Prison in London. While historians tend to believe that Sawney Bean never existed, his story has passed into legend and is part of the Edinburgh tourism industry.
According to The Newgate Calendar, Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian during the 1500s. His father was a ditch digger and hedge trimmer, and Bean tried to take up the family trade but quickly realized that he had little taste for honest labour.
He left home with a vicious woman who apparently shared his inclinations. The couple ended up at a coastal cave in Bannane Head between Girvan and Ballantrae where they lived undiscovered for some twenty-five years. The cave was 200 yards deep and during high tide the entrance was blocked by water.
The couple eventually produced eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters. Various children and grandchildren were products of incest. Lacking the inclination for regular labour, the

Arthur Gary Bishop (Between January 1 to June 10, 1951 – June 10, 1988) was a convicted American child molester and serial killer. He confessed to the murders of five young boys in 1983, as a result of a routine police investigation.
Arthur Gary Bishop was born in Hinckley, Utah, the eldest of six brothers. Bishop was raised as a devout Mormon, and was an Eagle Scout and an honor student. When he was 18, Bishop served as a missionary in the Philippines.
Bishop was arrested for embezzlement in February 1978 and given a five-year suspended sentence, but he skipped his parole and fled to Salt Lake City, living under the alias "Roger Downs". In October 1978, the LDS Church excommunicated Bishop.
In Salt Lake City, Bishop, registering under his pseudonym, joined the "Big Brother" program. No one initially suspected "Downs" of child molestation, although dozens of children would accuse him of abuse after he was arrested for murder.
Bishop killed his first victim, a four-year-old named Alonzo Daniels, on October 14, 1979. Bishop lured the boy from the courtyard of his apartment complex to his own apartment with the promise of free candy. After attempting to sexually assault the child,

Bruce George Peter Lee (born Peter Dinsdale 31 July 1960) became one of Britain’s most prolific killers when he was convicted of 26 charges of manslaughter in 1981. He confessed to a total of 11 acts of arson, and was convicted of 26 counts of manslaughter. 11 of these were overturned on appeal. Lee was imprisoned for life in 1981.
Born in Manchester, the son of a prostitute, Lee was brought up in children's homes and suffered from epilepsy and congenital spastic hemiplegia in his right limbs, which left him with a limp in his right leg and a compulsion to hold his right arm across his chest. As an adult, he worked as a labourer and was known locally as "daft Peter". In 1979 his mother remarried. His stepfather's surname was Lee, and Dinsdale changed his name as an homage to Bruce Lee.
On 4 December 1979, a fire broke out at the front of a house in Selby Street, Hull. Inside were Edith Hastie and her sons Thomas, Charles (15), Paul (12), and Peter (8). The family was asleep at the time.
Charles rescued his mother by pushing her out of an upstairs window, but was unable to help his brothers. Both were in the same bedroom as he; however, opening the bedroom window had caused a

Cary Anthony Stayner (born August 13, 1961) is an American serial killer currently on death row for the 1999 murders of four women in Mariposa County near Yosemite, California.
Also known as Yosemite Sam, Stayner was born and raised in Merced, California. His younger brother, Steven, was kidnapped by child molester Kenneth Parnell in 1972 and held captive for more than seven years before escaping and being reunited with his family. Cary Stayner would later say that he felt neglected while his parents grieved over the loss of Steven. He would also later claim that, when he was 11, he was molested by an uncle.
When Steven escaped from Parnell and returned home in 1980, he received massive media attention; a true crime book and TV movie, both titled I Know My First Name is Steven, were made about the ordeal. Steven died in a motorcycle accident in 1989. The following year, Cary Stayner's uncle, with whom Cary was living at the time, was murdered.
Stayner attempted suicide in 1991 and was arrested in 1997 for possession of marijuana and methamphetamine, although the charges were eventually dropped.
In 1997, Stayner was hired as a handyman at the Cedar Lodge motel in El Portal, just

Charles Chi-Tat Ng (Chinese: 吳志達/吴志达 (Cantonese pronunciation: [ŋ̩̏ tsītàt̚]); Pinyin: Wú Zhìdá; born December 24, 1960) is a Chinese-American serial killer. He is believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake's ranch in Calaveras County, California.
After a lengthy dispute between Canada and the United States, Ng was extradited to California and was convicted of 11 murders. He is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.
Ng was born in Hong Kong, the son of a wealthy executive. As a child, he was harshly disciplined and abused by his father. As a teenager, Ng was described as a troubled loner and was expelled from several schools. When he was arrested for shoplifting at age 15, his father sent him to Bentham Grammar boarding school in Lancashire, England. Not long after arriving, he was expelled for stealing from other students and returned to Hong Kong.
Ng finally moved to the United States, where he entered Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. He dropped out after only one semester.
In early 1980, although not a United States citizen, Ng enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. Ng

Christopher Bernard Wilder (13 March 1945 – 13 April 1984) was a serial killer who abducted and raped at least ten women and killed at least eight of them during a spree across the United States in early 1984. His rampage began in Florida and continued across the country through Texas, Oklahoma, Nevada, California and New York before he committed suicide during a struggle with police in New Hampshire on April 13. He is also believed to have raped girls aged 10 and 12 in Florida during 1983. For many years since his death, Wilder has also been considered the prime suspect in the unsolved Wanda Beach murder of two teenage girls in Sydney, Australia in 1965.
Wilder was born in Australia. His father was an American naval officer and his mother an Australian. He almost died at birth, but recovered, only to almost drown in a swimming pool at age two. In 1962 or 1963, he pleaded guilty in the case of a gang-rape at a beach in Sydney and was put on probation, during which time he also received electroshock therapy. There is some evidence to suggest that this course of treatment only exacerbated his violent sexual tendencies. It is known that he had virtually memorized the text of the 1963

Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova (Russian: Дарья Николаевна Салтыкова; née Ivanova, commonly known as Saltychikha) (1730 – 1801) was a Russian serial killer and noble from Moscow who became notorious for torturing and killing over 100 of her serfs, mostly women and girls.
Daria Ivanova married young into the famous Saltykov family. She was widowed by the age of 26. With her husband's death, she inherited a substantial estate, where she lived with her two young sons and a substantial number of serfs. Many early complaints to authorities about the deaths at the Saltykova estate were ignored, or resulted in punishment to the complainants, because Saltykova was well connected with holders of power at the royal court.
Eventually, however, relatives of the murdered women were able to bring a petition before Empress Catherine II. Catherine decided to try Saltykova publicly, in order to further her "lawfulness" initiative. Saltykova was arrested in 1762.
Saltykova was held for six years (until 1768), while the authorities conducted a painstaking investigation. Catherine's Collegium of Justice questioned many witnesses and examined the records of the Saltykova estate. The investigating official

"Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the media. The letter is widely believed to have been a hoax, and may have been written by a journalist in a deliberate attempt to heighten interest in the story. Other nicknames used for the killer at the time were "The Whitechapel Murderer" and "Leather Apron".
Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to proposals that their killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and letters from a writer or writers purporting to be the murderer were received by media outlets and Scotland Yard. The "From Hell" letter, received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, included half of a preserved human kidney, supposedly from one of the

Joel David Rifkin (born January 20, 1959) is an American serial killer convicted of the murder of nine women (although it is believed he killed as many as 17), mostly drug addicted prostitutes, between 1989 and 1993 in New York City. Also, he is suspected by some to be responsible for some of the Long Island Prostitute Murders whose remains were found in March and April 2011, as four of his victims' bodies were never found. In an April 2011 prison interview with Newsday, Rifkin denied having anything to do with recently discovered remains. Experts and victims' rights advocates, however, believe that Rifkin's recent statements have no value. Although Rifkin often hired prostitutes in Brooklyn and Manhattan, he lived in East Meadow, a suburban town on Long Island.
Rifkin's birth mother was a 20-year-old college student, birth father a 24-year old college student and army veteran. He was adopted by Benjamin Rifkin, who was of Russian Jewish descent, and his wife, Jeanne (Granelles), of Spanish descent, who converted to Judaism when she married. The Rifkin family did not have a synagogue affiliation; Joel considered himself to be an agnostic, having never had a bar mitzvah. The Rifkins

John Wayne Glover (26 November 1932 – 9 September 2005) was a British-born Australian serial killer convicted for the murders of six elderly women on Sydney's North Shore. Over a fourteen month period in 1989/90, Glover killed six elderly women for which he was dubbed the "granny killer". Following arrest in 1990, he admitted to the murders and was sentenced to consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He hanged himself in prison on 9 September 2005.
Originally from a working class family in Wolverhampton, England, Glover was convicted of many petty crimes dating back to 1947 for stealing clothing and handbags. He was later thrown out of the British army when these were discovered. Later, he emigrated to Australia in 1956. where he first lived in Melbourne. He had a troubled relationship with older women in his life, especially his mother Freda (who had had several husbands and many boyfriends), and after 1968 his mother-in law, when he married and moved into his parents-in-law's house in Mosman, Sydney.
Before John Glover began his killings in the late 1980s, he was a volunteer at the Senior Citizens Society, and was considered among his friends a

José Antonio Rodríguez Vega (3 December 1957 – 24 October 2002), nicknamed El Mataviejas (The Old Lady Killer), was a Spanish serial killer who raped and killed at least 16 elderly women, ranging in age from 61 to 93 years old, in and around Santander, Cantabria, between August 1987 and April 1988.
Rodríguez Vega was born in Santander, Cantabria, Spain. Rodríguez Vega hated his mother because she had thrown him out of the house when Rodríguez Vega beat his father, who was terminally ill. In 'revenge' against his mother, Rodríguez Vega started his criminal career raping many women until 17 October 1978 when he was arrested and sentenced to a term of 27 years in prison. However, his behavior while in prison, and his ability to charm his victims into forgiving him led to a reduction in his sentence to 8 years. Released in 1986, Rodríguez Vega's wife left him. He did not take the breakup well, but eventually remarried, this time to a mentally disabled woman, who he tortured and humiliated, all the while keeping up the pretense of having an excellent marriage. He was considered to be a good person, a hardworking man and good husband to those around him.
On 19 May 1988, Rodríguez Vega

Michel Fourniret (born 4 April 1942) is a convicted French serial killer who confessed, in June and July 2004, to kidnapping, raping and murdering 9 girls in a span of 14 years during the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. He was also accused of 10 additional murders, nine in France and one in Belgium, and was found guilty of seven of these charges. The trials started on 27 March 2008, and ended on 28 May. He is sometimes referred to as the "Ogre/Beast of Ardennes".
Fourniret was arrested after a failed attempt to kidnap a Belgian girl in June 2003. His wife, Monique Olivier exposed him after hearing the news of another child murderer's wife (Michelle Martin, wife of Marc Dutroux) being convicted. Fourniret has been charged with the abduction of minors and sexual misconduct, and has been in detention since June 2003 for the attempted kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl in 2000. Olivier has been charged with one murder and for helping him with a further six.
Fourniret buried at least two of his victims at his Sautou chateau near Donchery in the French Ardennes in the late 1980s. On 3 July 2004, a team of French and Belgian police recovered the bodies of two of Fourniret's victims near the

Rosemary Pauline "Rose" West (née Letts) (born 29 November 1953) is a British serial killer, now an inmate at HMP Low Newton, Brasside, Durham, after being convicted of 10 murders in 1995. Her husband Fred, who committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial, is believed to have collaborated with her in the torture and murder of at least 10 young women, many at the couple's home in Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England.
Fred West is known to have carried out 12 murders. Rosemary West had no involvement in the first two.
Rosemary Letts was born in Barnstaple, Devon, to William Andrew and Daisy Gwendoline Letts after a difficult pregnancy. Her mother suffered from depression and was given ECT while pregnant; some have argued that this may have caused prenatal injury to her daughter. Rosemary grew up into a moody teenager and performed poorly at school.
Rosemary's parents split up when she was a teenager. She lived with her mother before moving in with her father at the age of 16 in Bishop's Cleeve, near Cheltenham; her father was prone to violence and repeatedly sexually abused her. At around this time, she began dating West who was living at Lake House Hotel Caravan Park, Stoke

Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, he confessed shortly before his execution to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978; the true total remains unknown, and could be much higher.
Bundy was regarded as handsome and charismatic by his young female victims, traits he exploited in winning their trust. He typically approached them in public places, feigning an injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before overpowering and assaulting them at a more secluded location. He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes for hours at a time, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made further interaction impossible. He decapitated at least 12 victims and kept some of the severed heads in his apartment for a period of time as mementos. On a few occasions he simply broke into dwellings in the dead of night and bludgeoned

Zdzisław Marchwicki (b. October 18, 1927 in Dąbrowa Górnicza - April 29, 1977 in Katowice, Poland) called the "Zagłębie vampire", was a Polish serial killer.
He was born in 1927 to a lower-class family. His father went through five marriages in which four children were born - three brothers and a sister - all of whom were later charged along with Zdzisław for criminal conspiracy, robbery and obstructing justice.
Marchwicki committed all of his killings in the following areas: in the neighbourhoods of Czeladź, Będzin, and adjoining towns in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie and Upper Silesia. The murders started in 1964 and continued, with occasional breaks, until late 1970.
Having been arrested in early 1972, Marchwicki was charged with the murder of fourteen women and the attempted murder of another six, but one attempted murder charge was not proven.
After a highly publicized show trial which lasted for 10 months, Marchwicki received the death sentence in July 1975. His execution took place in 1977.
Zdzisław's brother Jan Marchwicki also received the death penalty, while his third brother Henryk was sentenced to 25 years for taking part in a conspiracy to commit murder. The half-sister,

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